Elon Musk
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, I have a sort of, you know, in sort of doing a sensible deregulation and... reduction in the size of government is just be very public about it, and say which of these rules, if the public is really excited about a rule and wants to keep it, we'll just keep it. And here's the thing about the rules, if the rule turns out to be bad, we'll just put it right back.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Okay, and then problem solved. It's easy to add rules, but we don't actually have a process for getting rid of them. That's the issue. There's no garbage collection for rules.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, round of numbers. It's pretty nutty. There is like this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world. And this is something we should be very concerned about. You know, you have to ask, like, why was the First Amendment like a high priority? It was like number one. It's because... People came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So maybe explain, because this is the first time. Yeah, there were like so many articles like that this is, Coder is dead forever. There's no way it could possibly even,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
They're really triggered, but... Yeah, I mean, if you like being condemned repeatedly, then, you know, for reasons that make no sense, then Threads is the way to go.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, I think we'd need to do more than that, I think.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, look, I think we've, you know, If Trump wins, and obviously I suspect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen, but we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing, besides the regulations, America's also going bankrupt extremely quickly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
and everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, you know, The Defense Department budget is a very big budget, okay? It's a trillion dollars a year, DOD, Intel, it's a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year, just in interest and rising.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We're adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are gonna have to pay somehow, every three months. And then soon it's gonna be every two months, and then every month. And then the only thing we'll be able to pay is interest. It's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt, And this does not have a good ending.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And so we have to reduce the spending.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, I do think it's sort of... you know, it's a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is gonna happen. You really have to say like, is it the right level? And just remember that, Any given person, if they are doing things in a less efficient organization versus a more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net output of goods and services will reduce.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And they were like, well, we'd like to not have that here. Because that was terrible. And actually, you know, there's a lot of places in the world right now, if you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, you've got a couple of clear examples between East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. I mean, North Korea, they're starving. South Korea, it's like amazing. It's the future.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, it's night and day. And so in North Korea, you've got 100% government. In South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40% government. It's not zero. And yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea. At least. At least, exactly. And then East and West Germany. In West Germany, just thinking in terms of cars, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And East Germany, which is a random line on a map, The only car you could get was a Trabant, which is basically a lawnmower with a shell on it. And it was extremely unsafe. There was a 20-year wait. So you put your kid on the list as soon as they're conceived. And even then, only, I think, a quarter of people maybe got this lousy car.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And so that's just an interesting example of basically the same people, different operating system. And it's not like West Germany with some you know, a capitalist heaven. It was, it's quite socialist actually. So when you look, you know, probably it was half government in West Germany and 100% government in East Germany. And again, sort of a five,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I'd like to call it at least a 5 to 10x standard of living difference, and even qualitatively, vastly better. And it's obviously, you know, sometimes people have these, amazingly in this modern era, this debate as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better. The one that doesn't need to build the wall to keep people in, okay?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
You have to build a barrier to keep people in. That is the bad system. It wasn't West Berlin that built the wall. Okay. They were like, you know, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So, you know, and if you look at sort of the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba. And there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to go back to Cuba. Plenty of seats. There's like, hey, wow, an abandoned boat. I could use this boat to go to Cuba where they have communism. Awesome.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, we'd like to not have that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And yet nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing. So... He's given this a lot of thought.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
If we cut government spending in half, jobs will be created fast enough to make up for... Right, just to count... Obviously, I'm not suggesting that people have immediately tossed out with no severance and now can't pay their mortgage. Then you see some reasonable off-ramp where...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, so a reasonable off-ramp where they're still receiving money but have, I don't know, a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find, and then they will be in a different operating system. Again, you can see the difference. East Germany was incorporated into West Germany. Living standards in East Germany rose dramatically.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Can I add to that? I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, you know, there's that old phrase, go postal. I mean, it's like they might.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, I'm going to need a lot of security details, guys.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, the sheer number of disgruntled workers, former government employees is quite a scary number. I mean, I might not make it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I like your idea of an offering. But the thing is that if it's not done, like if you have a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation opportunity and you don't take serious action and then... You have four years to get it done, and if it doesn't get done, then... How serious is Trump about this?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, he is very serious about it. Got it. No, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity, and I think we will have a golden age in this country. And it'll be fantastic. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. In fact, there's a very exciting launch that is maybe happening tonight. So if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral. for the Polaris Dawn mission, which is a private mission, so funded by Jared Isaacman, and he's an awesome guy. And this will be the first time, the first commercial spacewalk, and it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I sure hope so, man. No pressure. Yeah, you know, astronaut safety is, man, if I had all the wishes I could save up, that would be the one to put on. So, you know, space is dangerous. So, the... Yeah, the next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship. The next flight of Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting for regulatory approval.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, they accidentally tell a joke and I was like, oh no, this is going to take a long time. But yeah, Zootopia, you know, the funny thing is like, so I went to the DMV about, I don't know, a year later after Zootopia, and to get my license renewal, and the guy, in an exercise of incredible self-awareness, had the sloth from Zootopia in his cube, and he was actually Swift.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
No, I mean, sometimes people think the, The government is more competent than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government, they're just in an operating system that is inefficient.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Once you move them to a more efficient operating system, their output is dramatically greater, as we've seen when East Germany was reintegrated with West Germany, and the same people were vastly more prosperous, with a basically half-capitalist operating system. But I mean, for a lot of people, like the maybe most direct experience with the government is the DMV.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And then the important thing to remember is that the government is the DMV at scale. Right. That's the government. Got the mental picture. How much do you want to scale it?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's like you like to you like to Facebook posts throw them in the prison. Yeah People got an actual, you know prison for for like like obscure comments on social media not even shitposting like not even Like what is the
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I'm not saying say you're watched by these, but these... But based on our current progress with Starship, we were able to successfully reach Oval of Velocity twice. We were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in water. And that's despite the ship having half its flaps cooked off. You can see the video on the X platform. It's quite exciting.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We think we'll be able to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. The fundamental holy grail breakthrough for rocketry, the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi-planetary is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket. With a pirate somehow. Throw a pirate in there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. So for any given project, you have to say, this is the circle to write Venn diagrams. Here's a circle, and it is success, the success dot in the circle, is success in the set of possible outcomes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where that success is not in the set of possible outcomes. And so Starship, Not only is full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch. And I'm confident we'll succeed. It's simply a matter of time. And if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That would be very helpful. And in fact, if something isn't done about reducing regulation and sort of speeding up approvals, and to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe. It's simply the processing of the safe thing can be done as fast as the rocket is built, not slower.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
then we could become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species and be out there among the stars in the future. It's incredibly important that we have things that we find inspiring, that you look to the future and say the future is going to be better than the past. Things to look forward to. Kids are a good... a good way to assess this. Like, what are kids fired up about?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And if you could say, you know, you could be an astronaut on Mars. You could maybe one day go beyond the solar system. We could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy real. That is an exciting future. That is inspiring. You know, I mean, you need things that move your heart. Right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you look forward to as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I've always wondered if like... Rocket technology is considered advanced weapons technology, so we can't just go do it, you know... In another country. Yes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I wish people were trying to steal it. So, no one's trying to steal it. It's just too... It's too crazy, basically.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that is, they actually do so much business with the government, they have sort of impedance match to the government. So they're like basically one notch away from the government. They're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint because they derive so much of their revenue from the government.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And a lot of people think, well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government. And actually, no, most of our revenue is commercial. So... And there's been, I think, at least up until perhaps recently, because they have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. And the CEO before that I think had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory and didn't know how airplanes flew.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Um, so I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and a spacecraft go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work. So, you know, I'm like, sure, if somebody's running Coke or Pepsi and they're great at marketing or whatever, that's fine, because it's not a sort of technology-dependent business.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, I guess we are trying to figure out is there some reasonable solution in Brazil. You know, the concern, I mean, I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And, you know, funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that, at least at XCorp, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Or if they're running financial consulting in their degrees in accounting, that makes sense. But I think if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. It's like it's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse. He's fucking inspired the team. I'm sorry. I'm scared of horses. Gets on backwards. I'm like, oops.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean, it does run ahead of the revenue right now. There's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far. And it's, I mean, for example, the Turing test used to be a thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
now your basic open source, random LLM, you're writing on a frigging Raspberry Pi probably could, you know, beat the Turing test. So there's, I think actually, the good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is, an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Everyone can have whatever they want, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is a manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of goods and services will be, trend to zero, I'm not saying it'll be actually zero, but it'll be, everyone will be able to have anything they want.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That's the good future. Of course, in my view, that's probably 80% likely, so look on the bright side. Only 20%, 20% probability of annihilation, nothing. Is the 20%, what does that look like? I mean, frankly, I do have to go engage in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And even then, because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue is like, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do a bit better? That is perhaps the bigger challenge. At this point, I know more and more people who are retired and they seem to enjoy that life.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
But I think that maybe there'll be some crisis of meaning because the computer can do everything you can do but better. So maybe that'll be a challenge. But really, you need the sort of end effectors. be autonomous cars and you need the sort of humanoid robots or general purpose robots. But once you have general purpose humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, really you can build anything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think that there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. I mean, there's obviously the mass of Earth, like that would be one limit. But the economy is really just the average productivity per person times number of people. That's the economy. And if you've got humanoid robots that can do, where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
and they can operate very intelligently, then there's no actual limit to the economy. There's no meaningful limit to the economy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So obviously we cannot as an American company impose American laws and values on other countries that, you know, we wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do, you know, think that if a country's laws are a particular way, and we're being asked to, we think we're being asked to break them, and be silent about it, then obviously that is no good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Is that right? It's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, the Tesla problem is different from the... you know, the sort of LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence actually is actually, and what matters in the AI is different to the point you just made, which is that in Tesla's case, the context length is very long. So we've got gigabytes of context. Gigabyte context windows, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, you've got, you know, sort of... I was just bringing it up. Kind of billions of tokens of context. Nutty amount of context because you've got seven cameras, and if you've got several, you know, let's say you've got a minute of several high-def cameras, then that's gigabytes. So you need to compress.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So the Tesla problem is you've got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter, and you know, and condense that over a time, so you've got to, in both the time dimension and the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels in space and the pixels in time, and then have that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking, a small one, like a few hundred watts.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's a Tesla-designed AI inference computer, which is probably still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers. So the Tesla-designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier. Just by the way, that's kind of a... The Tesla AI chip team is extremely good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. No, the Tesla chip design team is extremely good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's not intentionally per se, but... Yeah, I mean, the... There's training and inference, and we do have those two projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer, and then our inference chip, which is in every car, inference computer. At Dojo, we've only had Dojo 1. Dojo 2, we should have Dojo 2 in volume towards the end of next year.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And that will be, we think, sort of comparable to sort of a B200 type system, a training system. And, you know, so I guess there's some potential for that to be used as a service. Dojo is just kind of like... I mean, I guess I have like some... improved confidence in Dojo, but I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version three.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It usually takes three major iterations on a technology for it to be excellent, and we'll only have the second major iteration next year. The third iteration, I don't know, maybe late 2020. 26 or something like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
you know, anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials. So now there's, I should say, some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and like paying for patents and stuff. So a lot of, you know, what's in a chip is like paying royalties and depreciation of the chip fab. But the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So I just want to be clear, sometimes it comes across as Elon's trying to just be a crazy, whatever, billionaire, and demand outrageous things from other countries. you know, while that is true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So Optimus obviously is a humanoid robot. It weighs much less and is much smaller than a car. So you could expect that in high volume, and I'd say that you also probably need three production versions of Optimus. So you need to refine the design at least three major times, and then you need to scale production to sort of the million unit plus per year level.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think at that point, the cost, the labor and materials on Optimus is probably not much more than $10,000.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Basically, think of it like, Optimus will cost less than a small car.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So at scale volume with three major iterations of technology, and so if a small car you know, costs $25,000, you know, it's probably like, I don't know, $20,000 for an Optimus, for a humanoid robot that can be your buddy, like a combination of R2-D2 and C-3PO, but better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean... Honestly, I think people are going to get really attached to their humanoid robot because, I mean, like you look at sort of what Star Wars is like, R2-D2 and C-3PO, I love those guys. Yeah. You know, they're awesome. and their personality, and I mean, all R2 could do is just beep at you. You couldn't speak English. Maybe C3PO to translate the beeps.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I would say major iterations are less than two years, so it's probably on the order of five years. maybe six to get to a million units a year.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans. Vastly, yeah. Vastly exceed. I mean, you have to say, who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Totally. You know, it's just like, especially if it can, you know, it can take care of your, take your dog for a walk, it could, you know,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
In addition, there are other things that I think are, you know, valid, which is like, we obviously can't, you know, I think any given thing that we do at XCorp, we've gotta be able to explain in light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or, you know, We did the wrong thing. That's the nature of the concern.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
mow the lawn, it could watch your kids, it could teach your kids, it could... But we could also send it to Mars. Yeah, absolutely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Mars is already a robot planet. There's a whole bunch of robots, like rovers and helicopters. It's only robots. Yeah, it's only robots. So yeah, the... No, I think the sort of useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because if you assume like, I mean, the ratio of humanoid robots to humans is going to be at least two to one, maybe three to one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Because everybody will want one, and then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, we are a generalized robot. Yeah, we're a generalized non-robot. We're just made of meat, you know?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, I'm operating my meat puppet, you know? So, yeah, we are actually, and by the way, it turns out like as we're designing Optimus, we sort of learn more and more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped. And why we have five fingers and why your little finger is smaller than your index finger.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Obviously why you have opposable thumbs, but also why, for example, the muscles, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm. and your fingers are primarily operated. The muscles that actuate your fingers are located, the vast majority of your finger strength is actually coming from your forearm. And your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand. and has only 11 degrees of freedom. So it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom. And it's also not strong enough in certain ways because the actuators have to fit in the hand.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So the next generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm, just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like the human hand. And the next generation hand has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is enough to do almost anything that a human can do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It was a little terrorizing on the first couple of days, but... Yeah, I was a bit worried at the beginning there because, frankly, nothing was funny.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Rough. Yeah, so, I mean...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, how much time do we have here?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
You really wanna hear that? I mean.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
All right, here we go, guys. All right, so one of the things that I think everyone's been sort of wondering this whole time is, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Like live. Live, live, live. Or do they have like a delay or like just in case, you know, there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that. Is it like a, you know, five second delay? What's really going on?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
But there's a way to test this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
There's a way to test this, which is we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and say, this is the script I'll throw on the ground. We're gonna find out tonight, right now, if Saturday Night Live is actually live. And the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to take my cock out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And if you don't, it's been a lie.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We're gonna bust them right now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, yeah, so we're pitching this. On Zoom. Yeah, we're pitching this on Zoom on like a Monday. It's COVID. Yeah, we're like kind of hungover from the weekend and we're like pitching this at noon. We're in Miami, yeah. And it's, you know, Jason's on. And Mike, you know, my friends who I think are sort of quite funny, you know, Jason's quite funny.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We actually are in discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground. What's actually going on? If we're being asked to break the law Brazilian law, then that obviously should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary. And if we're not and we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we're mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I think Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in real life.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And my friend Mike's pretty funny too. So we come in just like guns blazing with ideas. And we didn't realize actually that's not how it works. That's normally like actors and they just get told what to do. I'm like, oh, you mean we can't just like... do funny things that we thought of. What?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Is our mic on? And they're like, we hear you. And then after a long silence, Mike just says the word, crickets. And they're not laughing. Not even a chuckle. I'm like, what's going on here?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So Elon says... So then I'm like... So I say, like, I'm going to reach down... Into my pants. Into my pants. And I stick my hand in my pants. And I'm going to pull my cock out. And I tell this to the audience. And the audience is going to be like, what? Right. And? And then I pull out a baby rooster. You know?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And it's like, okay, this is kind of PG. It's not that bad. This is my tiny cock. And... And it's like, what do you think? And do you think it's an ice cock? I mean, I like it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but yeah. But I hope you like it anyway. But Kate's got to come out with her cat, okay?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And Kate says... You can see where this is going. And I say, wow, that's a nice pussy you've got there, Kate. Wow, that's amazing. It looks a little wet. Was it raining outside? No. Do you mind if I stroke your pussy? Is that cool? It's like, oh, no, Elon, actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, Kate, you definitely hold my cock. And then, you know, we exchange.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think just the audio version of this is pretty good. Right. And, you know, it's just like, wow, I really like stroking your cock. And I was like...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
A lot of moms in the audience. And I'm like, well, that's a good point.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they'll dig it. Maybe they'll like it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, there's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these cue cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it. I just went off the rails.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Oh, yeah. I wanted to do the Doge father, like you sort of redo that scene from The Godfather. I mean, you kind of need the music to cue things up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Listen, you ask for Doge. And I give you Bitcoin, but you want Doge. Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You got to have a tuxedo. And this whole concept of the Doge father.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We'll save the other eight.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Oh, yeah, yeah. There have been three articles, and I think in the past three weeks. Robert Reich. But it wasn't just him. It was three different articles.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Calling for me to be imprisoned. In the guardian, you know. Guardian of what?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Guardian of, I don't know. Authoritarianism?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
if somebody's sort of trying to push a false premise on the world, then that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail. So that's, I think, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, then we want to suppress it. Now, the sort of
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
But what we're trying to do with XCorp is, I distinguish that from my son, who's also called X. You have parental goals, and then you have goals for the company. Everything's just called X, basically. It's a very difficult disambiguation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, it's X everything. So what we're trying to do is simply adhere to the... you know, the laws in a country. So if something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in, you know, Europe Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down and we'll suspend the account because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Okay, now we're injecting ourselves in as a censor and where does it stop and who decides? And where does that path lead? I think it leads to a bad place. If the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different. But otherwise, we're gonna obey the law in each jurisdiction.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's not more complicated than that. We're not trying to fill out the law. I'm going to be clear about that. We're trying to adhere to the law. And if the laws change, we will change. And if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. I mean, it's rarely a slow week. I mean, in the world as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yes, it's very straightforward. And if somebody thinks we're not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit. Bingo.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, it is illegal. It is illegal in those countries.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
No, in some cases, it is just obviously illegal. Like, you don't need to file a lawsuit for... if something is just unequivocally illegal, we can literally read the law, this violates the law, anyone can see that. You don't need, if somebody is stealing, you don't need, let me check the law on that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yes, yes. I posted that one. Tell us about it. I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator. And I posted it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, any given week, it just seems like the thing's getting out of here.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I think with great difficulty, but it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations. And the last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early 80s. We're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think it's just if we don't do that, then what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Like if you look at the absurdity of the California high-speed rail, I think they spent $7 billion and have a 1,600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, your tax dollars at work, I mean.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That's an expensive 1,600 feet of concrete, you know? And I mean, I think it's like, you know, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but, you know. I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was, you know, not an optimist. But at the current trend, California high speed rail might finish sometime next century. Maybe, but probably not.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean... Well, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, exactly. AI do everything at that point. I think you really think of the United States, and many countries, it's arguably worse than the EU, as being like Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. And like any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them, or millions actually. And then eventually you just can't get anything done.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. It's just they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations. I'll give you a recent example that is just insane. SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for, they claimed, dumping potable water on the ground, drinking water. And we're like, this is at Starbase.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And we're like, we're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And... And there was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff. And there's zero harm done. And they're like, they agree, yes, there's zero harm done. And we're like, okay, so there's no harm done. And you want us to pay $140,000 fine?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's like, yes, because you didn't have a permit. Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero harm, fresh water being on the ground in a place that where fresh water falls from the sky all the time.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much the roads are flooded. So we're like, you know, how does this make any sense?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And then they were like, well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch, unless you pay this $140,000. So they just ransomed us. And we're like, okay, so we paid $140,000. But it's like, this is no good. I mean, at this rate, we're never going to get to Mars.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And just to give you a sense of size, the Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
No, there were bigger buildings, but the Pentagon's a pretty big one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
In units of Pentagon, it's like three.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I think it's like 44 billion, something like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Got it. In 14 months. Just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years. So that's the issue.
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Apple News Today
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We have differences of opinion. There's things that I don't entirely agree with. But it's difficult for me to bring that up in an interview because then it creates a bone of contention. So then I'm a little stuck in a bind.
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I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.
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Why a court just struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs
I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn't decrease it, and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing. I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both, my personal opinion.
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It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Yeah. None of nothing that is happening right now is plausible in the, in a storytelling, in a fictional storytelling setting. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Yeah, they're there. The great idiot theory of revolutions is a very simple thing, which is just saying that revolutions don't happen because some tyrant is in power and they are intolerably oppressing their people. People have been intolerably oppressed for a long time.
Behind the Bastards
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Trotsky's got this quote that is, if peasant discontentment was the cause of revolution, then there would be a revolution happening every single day because the peasants are always discontented.
Behind the Bastards
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So what it takes to really have a revolution is for somebody in power to be kind of incompetent and to start doing stupid things that allow the situation to get out of hand and on top of that really piss off the other elites around them because it's the mismanagement of the state that allows the elites that are that are competent. kind of necessary for a full blown revolution.
Behind the Bastards
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Like you need their resources and you need their money and you need them being close to a position of power to be able to pop whoever's in there at the time. And you gotta be pretty incompetent to like wreck an elite consensus, right? Like that is in and of itself, catastrophically stupid if you're trying to stay in power. And so yes, the great idiot theory is getting quite a workout lately.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Yeah, I mean, it's a mix of things. And, I mean, you got it. Like, Mabel Dorr is meant to be sort of the colonial elite. Yeah. And she's also meant to be sort of the liberal nobility in lots of different revolutionary settings. And she is doing that.
Behind the Bastards
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Like, and when she is, like, when I talk about her, like, funding the Society of Martians and, like, funding all these, like, philanthropic, you know, enterprises to help Martians, like, that's a lot of Philippa Galate, like, straight up. Like, that's what the Duke d'Orléans was doing in, you know, 1786, 87, and 89. And so that's the role that she's playing.
Behind the Bastards
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But, you know, if the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any kind of, like, peasant or worker uprising to actually get traction and succeed in overthrowing the state. Like, peasant insurrections have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support. They have... often accomplished great things.
Behind the Bastards
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But when you think about the great revolutions in history, there really have always been people in the inner corridors of power who are ready to get rid of whoever the sovereign is in that moment. And, you know, you can advance all the way to the Russian revolution.
Behind the Bastards
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And this is, you know, this is the prototypical, like the workers have risen up and the army is mutinying and it is the people who overthrow the czar. And what that story misses is all of the people, even inside the Romanoff family itself, who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and Alexander are doing that they're just like, we don't know what to do anymore.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
But like, he's, yeah, I guess he's got to go. You know, like we can't get him to see reason. We can't get him to change course. We can't get him to do anything. Like the situation is completely out of hand. And without those people, right.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
leaning on Nicholas to force his abdication and also to say, like, we're not going to back you up if you try to bring the hammer down on all these people, then that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Like Lenin understood what the game was and he understood what was going on. And you don't have to like if you're a revolutionary and you're sympathetic to the communists in 1917. You don't have to say, oh, well, the elites were necessary for this first revolution, and we need a break inside the ruling class. We need divisions inside the ruling class.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
That doesn't mean you have to say, and what those people want out of overthrowing the czar is what we want and what we're going to accept. You know, obviously, like, the cousins of Tsar Nicholas and the people who are in those inner circles of power, they wanted him out of there just so they could run the empire a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly the empire was being run.
Behind the Bastards
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They didn't want a social revolution. But if you're going to take down that whole system... Creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary, but you don't have to support the ultimate aims of those people. It's just, it's an ingredient.
Behind the Bastards
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And this is, and you see this in the course of revolutions and you see this in 1917, you see this 1789 and then 1792, where there is that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign. And then there is a second wave that overthrows the people who did it first. Right.
Behind the Bastards
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And so, you know, you can hold out hope for, you know, getting the job done without, without thinking that elites do play some role in all of that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great point.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Yeah. The deportation stuff is just because of my own personal political commitments over the course of my adult life. Right. Which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system in this country, you know, and, and, you know, we, they say like, oh, we've got this like open borders. Like we do not have open borders.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
It is actually really, really hard to like navigate your way properly through the American uh, immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken. And we did all of this, you know, we did the worst of the horrors with Trump, right?
Behind the Bastards
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Like, obviously that is on my mind with, you know, with family separations and putting people in camps and abusing people and rounding people up, like all of this stuff, which happened under Trump. Yes. But it also happened under Obama for eight years and it happened for another four years under Biden. It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it because, uh,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
It wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there is a through line of cruelty inside of this system towards immigrants. So that issue of deportation and like rounding people up and evicting them, especially those who have lived in this place their entire life, like that's one of the points that I make. Yeah. The people who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars.
Behind the Bastards
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Like one of the main characters, Alexandra Clare, she is a fourth generation Martian. And she just gets caught up in these like stupid layoffs that Timothy Werner is pushing through. And now the only choice that she has is to either hide or get deported to Saturn. And nobody's ever come back from Saturn.
Behind the Bastards
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We have no idea what happens on Saturn because all they know is that nobody ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing, like taking people who are born and raised in America, this is the only place that they have ever known, right? Even if they came here when they were like one, like, okay, they weren't born here, but like they're here since they were one.
Behind the Bastards
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And then you're like, okay, we're going to send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico. They don't know anybody in Mexico. They don't probably even speak Spanish half the time, you know? And doing this to people is cruel, right? It is unconscionable what we do to people.
Behind the Bastards
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And so, yeah, like so when I was thinking to myself, OK, I'm going to write this like fictional revolution, it's going to be on Mars. What are some of the things that I want to do that will make the revolution happen? Yeah, some of this does is like a little bit of like this is these are Mike's political interests and.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
the deportation issue and trying to highlight the horror of the deportation issue and laud those who would hide those people and help those people and bring those people food. Like the, the bravest people going are the ones who like go out and leave, you know, water jugs out in the middle of the desert. So people don't die. Right.
Behind the Bastards
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And the cruelest thing is these guys who go out and then break those, like knowing that people are going to, knowing that people are going to like die of dehydration and die of starvation,
Behind the Bastards
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And then it's really important to remember that this is not just a Trump problem. Like what he's doing right now is like, of course, like we are entering next levels beyond next levels of what he's doing. And even, you know, just this morning, we've got an American citizen who has been held and they are not being released despite the passport and the social security card being shown to the judge.
Behind the Bastards
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And the judge is like, I don't I can't actually release this person. Yeah, that's sort of where we're at now. But this has been an ongoing thing for 20 years across both parties and both administrations.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
And nothing really has like sort of churned my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of the Democrats and people doing like sort of postmortems on the election and being like, well, you know, we really should be tougher on the border. And we really should sort of like buy into this framing that there is this like invasion and we just need to do border enforcement better.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Like and they're then even moving positioning themselves to a place where it's like Trump's not even doing a good job protecting the border. And like there was somebody I forget even who it was, but somebody one of them senators like tweeted, you know. this time last year, Biden had deported this many people and Trump isn't even deporting that many people.
Behind the Bastards
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And he was like trying to make this point that like Trump wasn't following through on his promises or something, but it's like, do you even hear yourself? Like, do you even hear yourself? Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And I can't,
Behind the Bastards
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you know, stomach the fact that the Democrats are, are going to take away from all this, that, that the American people love cruelty towards immigrants and that we need to lean into that. And then you see the polls before all the tariff stuff and you, all this stuff is going on and he, Trump is still sitting at like 50% approval. And it's like, I don't know, maybe they're right.
Behind the Bastards
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Maybe the American people really do just love this.
Behind the Bastards
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And like on Mars, you know, that, that sort of communal stuff is like, they're also living in close quarters. So you can't really be somebody who needs to be alone. Right. That's a, that's a thing. And then also like in, in terms of like the early colonization of Mars, like, yeah, you have to do this stuff together.
Behind the Bastards
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And like, there's, there's a, like when I was doing like cultural, like there's cultural background, like, like works and, and, you know, like music that was going on that the Martians were creating and,
Behind the Bastards
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And I didn't quite get into this, but there is a song that I've got like half written called The Ballad of Lonely Joe, which is like a, it's like a Martian folk song about Lonely Joe who went off and tried to like do it himself. But I mean, he never comes back.
Behind the Bastards
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And now Lonely Joe like wanders the red sands of Mars because like he tried to go out and not do it like with the group and not do it with the community because you can't survive alone on Mars. Yeah. But to your other point, like one of the things that I definitely wrote into the show is that Everybody on Mars has a skin chip in their hand and the skin chip in their hand is what like opens door.
Behind the Bastards
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It like literally opens doors and it gives them access to the commissary and it gives them access to restaurants. It gives them access to food and employment. Like everything goes through that skin chip. And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin chips just get turned off effectively. And it doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore.
Behind the Bastards
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They are living inside of a society that they literally cannot interact with anymore. And so it took other Martians around them. And so there's a thing in the show called the No Doors Movement, which is Martians jamming open doors so that the people who have, they were called the annulled because their contracts were annulled.
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But so that the annulled could get from here to there without needing their skin chip. Yeah, those are the kinds of things that are necessary. And those are the kinds of things that are going to protect people. And I hope that those things are going on out there. And I hope that none of us publicly state right now what we may or may not be doing on that front.
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Let's just go ahead and keep that where it's at.
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No, that's, that stuff is all in my mind. And like I said, like we're not meant to do anything alone. Like humans are communal creatures. Like you don't go anywhere in history, like all the way back to the dawn of the species. You do not find individual humans like living by themselves. We have always done this as a group. This has always been a group project.
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And like, when you go back, this is, this is something that comes out of sort of like, I studied a lot of like political theory in school and the state of nature, uh, sort of works. You know, these thought experiments that like Thomas Paine would do or Rousseau would do. And, you know, it's like, how did we come together? Why did we come together?
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Well, let's first imagine like an individual human wandering through the forest and like they encounter another one. So they come together for defense and they come together, you know, to share food and do some division of labor. And it's like, No, there's no such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing.
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Like any outgrowth that comes from our description of what human society is like, whether it's defense or the division of labor, begins with the fact that we are already a group. There is a mother, there is a child, there is a father, there are aunts and uncles and like whatever the group is.
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There's we are always doing this as a group and hyper individualization and hyper atomization of our society is something that is trying to undo one of the most fundamental parts of what it means to be human. This is something that I thought about a lot, too, because when I started having kids and
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And, you know, I have I have two kids and the model for like having a family at this point is like you have a mother, a father or whatever. You have kids. But the point being that they are a unit that is unto itself and they live in their own house and they have to supply their own food and they are in charge of getting their own money.
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And everything that happens is just up to that little nuclear family. Yeah. And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever done it before. Right. There's always been a broad network, a broad family friend network that has been a part of raising our kids and having our families. And if something bad happens, we don't just say, oh, wow, bad luck for them. You support that person. Yeah.
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And that is something that we've really gotten away from as a society, obviously.
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Not at all. What has been happening to me has been one of the most surreal six months of my life in terms of what I am writing and dropping out into the world. And then I turn on the news three weeks later, four weeks later, and I'm just watching exactly what I wrote down in the show come to life. It is horrifying and I hate it. Yeah.
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Yep. You know, people think these days that that atomized nuclear family is like the law of nature, right? That this is like, this is the way it's always been. And like, that's not true. It's just not true. There's a great line. I don't have it right in front of me at the moment, but in Tocqueville's Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, which is really dynamite book everybody should read.
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At the end of it, he lays it out. He's writing this in like the 1840s and 1850s. And he straight up says that like, what... liberal capitalism is doing, which he was himself. I mean, he's a conservative liberal. Like, it's not like he's on the left or anything, but he's, he's watching as the atomization of families and individuals is happening.
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And he's like, and that's how, that's what tyranny thrives on. Tyranny thrives when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is in competition with everybody else because that's the other key part of it is your family is now pitted against every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs, like getting that, getting this other thing.
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Like we're all scrambling out there in a competition to get a little bit more, a little bit better, or just, you know, have enough. Like I feel this every time I have to sign the kids up for like summer camp. You know, like I'm at war with every other family in the neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into this camp. And some people aren't going to make it and other people will.
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And you got to be there. You got to have strategies about when to log on to the thing, like because they because they they're pitting us against each other, like all the time in all of those little subtle ways. Yep.
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There's no, there's no year zero. There's no creating a new, there's no, there's no, there's no new man, you know, that's not ever going to happen.
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That's actually, I mean, just, I wouldn't even have thought that I'm going to tie this back again to Tocqueville, which the reason I would recommend Ancien Résime is because that is a book about how much of the revolution was a continuation of what was going on before it and not actually caused by the revolutionary break. And, and even if you believe in the revolution and believe it was this, I,
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I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these great things, but there was no Z year zero thing that happened. A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum. And, you know, like I don't want to get in a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a thing that exists or doesn't exist. Like, like as an, as an abstract thing, because it's,
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Because I'm not sure that it's true, but there sure are a lot of things that keep popping up, right? Like we're interested in sex and we have to eat food and we live in shelters and we make music. And there does seem to be some very like human qualities that exist across all time and across all space.
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And if you just say to yourself like, well, like, I mean, this is one of the things I'm very sympathetic to anarchists.
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Yeah. I mean, you guys have to change the name of your show because there's no good about it, man. We're just here. It's just going. Yeah. You know, I've had the notion to do this Martian revolution series for years. Like, I think I first came up with it back during like the French Revolution days is when I was like, you know, it would be a really cool thing to do.
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But there's a point with anarchism, especially the early stuff, where their idea was that if you smash the state and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed to flourish in their natural goodness and communalism, which is a little bit what we are moving towards right now, but I'm not sure even that exists. Because if you...
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if you crash the state out, it's not the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is, there is stuff inside of human nature. That's that we created the state to begin with. So the whole, the whole thing is like a very, it's a balancing act that has gone way too far in a certain direction.
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This is actually one of my points about immigration and migration is that no matter how tightly you try to control it, no matter – you could build every wall you want. You can make it as hard as you want. People are still going to move here. People are still going to move away from here. People are still going to go from here to there and from there to here. And that is something that –
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is going to happen no matter what. And especially if we're going into the 21st century with all of its various climate disasters that are facing us. On route, yeah. Yeah, it's already making some places less habitable and other places will be more habitable.
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And what's going to happen is the people who are living in less habitable areas are going to want to go to where there are areas that are still habitable. And so there's going to be movements of people
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And the question before us in the 21st century is not, you know, can we keep people in the places that they are now and, you know, like sort of lock in rigidly to like these xenophobic nation states and that will actually stop those migrations from happening? Or do we open ourselves up to the idea that this is going to happen and simply make it more humane and more rational? Yeah.
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That's the question. It's not whether the migrations will happen or not. It's simply how cruel they will be when they happen. And right now we are choosing maximum cruelty. Yep. Sucks.
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It's like once I've got all of these under my belt, just like make up a fictional revolution that kind of follows along like many of the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this has been kind of like years in the making.
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Right. And there's a lot of them who would like it to be the future of the Democratic Party because they don't care as much as Republicans don't care about the lives of these people who are living on this earth, who are living, breathing human beings, who are just someplace else and living in a world where like, yeah, the United States and Europe,
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And we suck up the world's wealth and resources like that's where the imperial center of the globe and people like all that. And even when people say, like, well, why do people come here?
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And, you know, there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion, which is like, well, they come here because they want their because they want freedom and freedom is what America offers and like the American dream and all that stuff like. the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's because this is where you can come and get the world's money.
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This is where it all is. It's sitting in my pocket. It's sitting in your pocket, right? We are the ones who have all of the world's money. And so that is why they are coming here. Yep. So you just have to like fit that in your brain. And what is happening is this constant division between like Americans being more important than anybody else. And I understand why that exists politically.
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And a lot of the sort of like plot points and ideas that I wanted to do, you know, I wanted it to be like a monopoly corporation because I also wanted to do some like social commentary and like. Yeah. what are the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now?
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And even these questions of like citizens versus non-citizens, like one of the things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was like, it was a throwaway line. It wasn't even like a point he was making, but he referred to something as mere citizenship.
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Which kind of struck me because I grew up very liberal. Like, I come from, like, the liberal suburbs of Seattle, and I had very liberal notions. And citizenship in sort of the liberal imagination is the highest thing that you can be, be a citizen of a polity with rights. There's a constitution. You get to participate in the government.
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Like, citizen and citizenship are these words that had great profound meaning. And it really kind of, like, knocked me sideways to have them be, like, mere citizenship, right? You've been reduced to simply politics. a part of a polity and your humanity has been taken away from you. You're no longer being recognized as a human being. You're being recognized as a citizen.
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And if you're not a citizen, then you just don't count at all. And it totally wipes out their humanity. So not only do I not have humanity because I'm simply a part of some polity rather than being me, Mike Duncan, a human being, but it's erasing our human obligations to each other, to non-citizens. And the idea, like, and you just see this very casually, like right now, like all over the place.
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It's just like, they're not citizens, so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens, so we can just send them to El Salvadorian torture prisons and it's fine because they're not citizens and therefore they don't have rights. It's like, what about, you know, just being a person thinking about other people? And one of the greatest, one of my very favorite, I know I'm steamrolling here.
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I'll let you get a word in edgewise here in a second. But I forget what the court case was, but there was a court case out of Texas, you know, like back in like the 60s when they decided that the Texas school districts had to open the schools to undocumented children. And they said that because it says in the 14th Amendment, persons. It doesn't say citizens.
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And, you know, and then I'm like, okay, then there's this thing called the new protocols that is going to, you know, help jumpstart the revolution. And this is somebody coming in and just, you know, implementing whole new software programs and hardware programs without any care for like what it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that are a part of this. And then deportations are, you know,
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And they were resting a lot of this on the notion that it says person has these rights, not citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and MAGA hate, hate, hate, hate. This is why they're going to try to undo the 14th Amendment.
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But to have the Supreme Court at one point in the past be like, no, you have to do this because you owe an obligation to them as a person, not just as a citizen. That's mind-blowing. I could not See the Supreme Court today making that same decision.
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But like that's that's the kernel of something really good, I think, for the future of humanity rather than like clinging to this like citizen or noncitizen thing.
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Yep. They don't. Yeah. Not, not, not in all this. And like, I mean, to bring it back to the Martian revolution, like the, one of the things that is happening right now, like in the series, I'm, you know, it's going to be 30 episodes long and I'm writing episode 23 right now, but like we've gone through the revolution. There's been, I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but obviously like,
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like all a part of the story of how the Martian revolution gets going. And, you know, this stuff was plotted out in October and I got to tell you, you know, maybe I was naive. Maybe I had my head in the sand. I thought she was going to win, man. Like I thought Harris was going to win the election. That's where I, that's where my head was at in September and October going into November.
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They win at certain points. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a very interesting story. And there is a debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries about who should count inside of the Martian constitution and this thing called the Republic of Mars that they have just declared. They're no longer a part of a corporation. They're going to be this thing called the Republic of Mars.
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And there is a guy – who is passionately committed to Mars and to the Martian people. And he hates earthlings and he doesn't trust earthlings. And there's no reason for him to trust earthlings. They have tried to screw them over a bunch of times and it caused nothing but pain. And so, but there are a bunch of earth born earthlings on Mars. And he wants to exclude them from the Republic of Mars.
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And if you're born on Mars, then you should get to participate. And if you're not, then you shouldn't have rights. You shouldn't be a part of this project. And I would love to just – I would love to deport you. That's what he's going to be arguing. And then there is another side that has a more universalist take on this.
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And my character, Alexandra Clare, who is like a D-class – she comes out of the Warrens, which you can just –
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now that's basically like the working class you know she's like when earthlings come here yeah i don't like it when they bungle things because they're new and they don't know what they're doing like i'm as annoyed by the new guy as anybody but like they've suffered right alongside me like suffering the same conditions like the fact that they were born on earth doesn't mean that they're not suffering right now that their contracts weren't annulled that they
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are not suffering from the new protocols. Like, and, you know, when during these revolutions, did they hold neutron guns in their hands and fight and die for Mars? Yeah, they did.
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And so probably we should say that it's not Martian good, Earthling bad, but like, let's just open it up to everybody and we will sort out like, you know, who's, you know, who's in on this and who's, who's actually trying to undermine us because, you know, there is, there are loyalist fifth columnists that they are going to have to deal with.
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I've got all the plot points, you know, I know where it's going, but just getting there is, is, yeah, it's weird because sometimes when you write fiction, characters are like, you weren't supposed to do that. And now I've got to deal with that. And like, what do you, well, she wouldn't do that in this moment.
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So I guess I was going to have her do it, but I just can't believe that she would ever do that in that situation. So I guess she can't do it and I'll have to figure that out. And that's my weekly struggle these days.
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Yeah, well, I mean, I wake up I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece of paper and have to have that week's episode done by Sunday night. So I'm writing these in real time.
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I was like, it'll be close. Of course it will. It's a toss up, but I think she'll pull it out in the end. It sure feels like it because they were running a field operations. And like the whole thing just kind of seemed like she was going to win. So for Trump to win and then start doing all of these things that were just supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh yeah. References. Yeah.
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Like now I'm just like, Jesus Christ, this, this is terrible. Yeah.
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Yeah. And, you know, the Timothy Werner character, he's like sort of the figure against whom the revolution is going to start.
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after he comes in and starts doing all this stuff. Like the number one, of course, as I'm releasing this, people are just like, this is just a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk, right? And which I would point out, the first thing is like, actually, no, because I very specifically wrote it so he was a good husband and father. Yes, he loves his kids.
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It's obviously not Elon Musk because he loves his kids.
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Yeah. Yeah. And they, they like, they get along great and everything. Yeah. So obviously it's not, but honest to God, like it wasn't meant to be just much, but it was meant to be those tech guys. Right. Like this is meant to be thinking about the guys who come in and they're like, we're going to, we're going to move fast and break things. Right.
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And then what they break is like 120 years of like labor law. Yeah. And that's the only thing that is actually being broken here. Like this is what, you know, what Uber is and all of those kinds of like all of that stuff that came at us in the last like 10 or 15 years.
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And they think that, yes, because they can code well or because they have this one ability to like, you know, market something in an effective way, that that means that they are brilliant and can do everything and everywhere for everybody. And like, we're going to reinvent this and we're going to reinvent that. But they have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about.
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You run into these people on Twitter all the time, this phenomenon of people being good in one area. Yes. And then becoming sort of all-purpose general knowledge experts when it's like you don't have any idea what you're talking about. No. And so there's a line that's in there where it's like, where Werner, the way that he thought is, I'm smart, therefore the ideas I have must be smart. Yes.
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And that is something that's not about Musk. That's about like just people I run into on Twitter all the time. Like that's, that's a, that's a phenomenon. That's a generalizable phenomenon.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, and, and what, you know, what Werner does here is so much of what Doge basically started doing when they start going into these systems, they start changing codes. They have no idea what, what are the key things that are actually underpinning our society?
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The most recent thing I saw that made me think of this is like, they're shutting down all the regional offices of the Social Security Administration and like all communications are now gonna be run through Twitter, right? And one of Timothy Warner's things is the centralization of all decision-making and the centralization of really everything.
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And in his mind, it would be more efficient if the company just had one brain and that was his brain, And every decision is made by the one brain. And so he's got all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions, except that is, that's crazy. That is not actually how you can run anything.
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And it just creates all of this, like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this in, I know I definitely did that. Like the dreaded, like request pending screen that people started getting, they would submit, they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order. And it would just say request pending and like request pending would never go away. It would just, that's what it would say.
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And then you look at what they're doing now. And they are trying to centralize everything. It's, you know, it's a generalized authoritarian power grab. But, you know, they are doing these things.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing is, like, everything that's in the show also is, like, basically something that comes from history, right? Like, and I am trying to do that. And it is something that, you know, like Charles I, Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas, these guys are all great family men. Yeah. Their kids love them and they love their kids, right?
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Like, one of the reasons the French Revolution happened is because Louis' son died, like, on the eve of the Estates General. And he was just not there because his son had just died. That's a real thing that happened.
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And the other stuff is like that sort of centralization of power is a lot – like what I was trying to get at there was actually like the reforms that went in for the European colonial powers after the Seven Years' War in the Anglo colonies, in the Spanish colonies, in the French colonies. All of those governments sort of undertook –
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A reorganization of their colonial structures after the Seven Years' War, it kind of like reshuffled who had what territory. And all of those moves were about sort of an increasing presence of the metropole in colonial life. And this is what triggers, you know, the American Revolution, because there was going to be like two more customs officials in Boston Harbor.
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And so like we went into revolt about this. But this is also true of like the bourbon reforms in Spanish America is that kind of like centralization of a community and of colonies that had grown very used to managing their own affairs. And so they're coming in and saying, well, yeah, this is ours. And we here on earth should be making these decisions for you Martians.
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And the Martians were like, well, we've been making these decisions for ourselves for like 70 years now. That's where that stuff is coming from. And then... History is always the place that I can point to, and then I have to watch it also on the TV.
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Yeah, we all do. And no, but like, like one of the things that was getting kicked around the other day was like, I had, I came to this point where Werner is going to start firing people. He's going to start firing people because he's changed the metrics for how your employment status is being rated. And he's firing just people essentially randomly. Like you are firing the head of this department.
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And now that department can't run anymore, but he's like, it'll be more efficient. And, and, When I was writing it, it was originally supposed to be like a kind of a more dramatic 10% across the board layoff. And as I got closer to actually trying to type that up and write it down, I was like, this doesn't actually feel believable to me. Like people are going to really push back.
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And I mean this sincerely, like people are going to push back that nobody would be so stupid as to just across the board, do a 10% layoff of something so critical as, you know, Mars is to earth because in, in the story, Mars is absolutely critical to how earth is able to function with the resources that they're able to get from there.
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And so I changed it around and actually looked to like the sullen prescriptions from from Roman history to kind of give it a different take, where really it was like you woke up every day and there was like 15 more names on the list, 100 more names on the list.
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And there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about that without this like unbelievable, you know, 10 percent across the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there being like, I know that people are going to think that this is like unrealistic, but you just have to understand that like throughout history, we have seen these things.
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Like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to it all the time because that is something that happens. And life as we know it is actually less, like if I wrote up what was happening right now, Like if I was just got like a window into an alternate world and we're living in a different world where Trump lost and I brought all this stuff back, they'd be like, this is implausible.
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Like, this is crazy. They would never be allowed to get away with that. They would never, they're not allowed to do that. It would never be so stupid as to blow up the global economy with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense to anybody.
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But we do need to move quickly if we're to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026.
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I actually just call myself a humble tech support here because this is actually... Musk spoke Wednesday at Trump's first cabinet meeting.
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They want America to have more babies. Is this their moment?
I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.
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They want America to have more babies. Is this their moment?
Only 20% chance of annihilation.
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They want America to have more babies. Is this their moment?
Nothing seems to be turning that around. Humanity is dying.
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They want America to have more babies. Is this their moment?
The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And unless that changes, civilization will disappear.
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They wouldn't be complaining so much if we weren't doing something useful, I think. All we're really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we're finding is that there's an unelected bureaucracy, speaking of unelected, there's a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet.
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Then take the concept you're trying to convey, compress that into a small number of syllables, speak them, and hope that the other person decompresses them into a conceptual structure that is as close to what you have in your mind as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, very lossy compression and decompression. And a lot of what your neurons are doing is distilling the concepts down to a small number of symbols, of say, syllables that I'm speaking, or keystrokes, whatever the case may be. So that's a lot of what your brain computation is doing. Now, there is an argument that that's actually
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
a healthy thing to do or a helpful thing to do because as you try to compress complex concepts, you're perhaps forced to distill what is most essential in those concepts as opposed to just all the fluff. So in the process of compression, you distill things down to what matters the most because you can only say a few things. So that is perhaps helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We'll probably get, if our data rate increases, it's highly probable that we'll become far more verbose. Just like your computer, you know, when computers had like, my first computer had 8K of RAM, you know, so you really thought about every byte. And, you know, now you've got computers with many gigabytes of RAM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So, you know, if you want to do an iPhone app that just says, hello world, it's probably, I don't know, several megabytes minimum, a bunch of fluff. But nonetheless, we still prefer to have the computer with more memory and more compute. So the long-term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI-human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words. I mean, if the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you're communicating at bits per second, it's like talking to a tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think there is some argument for humans as a source of will. Will. Will, yeah. Source of will or purpose. So if you consider the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
human mind as being essentially the there's the primitive limbic elements which basically even like reptiles have and there's the cortex that's the thinking and planning part of the brain now the cortex is much smarter than the limbic system and yet is largely in service to the limbic system it's trying to make the limbic system happy i mean the sheer amount of compute that's gone into people trying to get laid is insane without the without actually
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
seeking procreation they're just literally trying to do this sort of simple motion and they get a kick out of it yeah so this uh simple which in the abstract rather absurd motion which is sex uh the cortex is putting a massive amount of compute into trying to figure out how to do that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, yeah. There's no purpose to most sex except hedonistic. You know, it's just sort of joy or whatever. Dopamine release. Now, once in a while, it's procreation. But for humans, it's mostly... Modern humans, it's mostly recreational. And so... So your cortex, much smarter than your limbic system, is trying to make the limbic system happy because the limbic system wants to have sex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Or wants some tasty food, or whatever the case may be. And then that is then further augmented by the tertiary system, which is your phone, your laptop, iPad, whatever, or your computing stuff. That's your tertiary layer. So you're actually already a cyborg. You have this tertiary compute layer, which is in the form of your computer with all the applications, all your compute devices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so in the getting laid front, there's actually a massive amount of digital compute also trying to get laid. you know, with like Tinder and whatever, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. I mean, there's like gigawatts of compute going into getting laid, of digital compute. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Pretty much. Well, it's just one of the things, certainly, yeah. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that, yes, is there a use for humans... Well, there's this fundamental question of what's the meaning of life? Why do anything at all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so if our simple limbic system provides a source of will to do something that then goes to our cortex, that then goes to our, you know, tertiary compute layer, then, you know, I don't know, it might actually be that the AI in a benign scenario is simply trying to make the human limbic system happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. I mean, there are these sort of fairly cerebral kind of higher level goals. I mean, for me, it's like, what's the meaning of life or understanding the nature of the universe is of great interest to me and hopefully to the AI. And that's the, That's the mission of XAI and Grok is understand the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, assuming that they're not... I mean, they're solving basic... neurological issues that people have, you know, if they've got damaged neurons in their spinal cord or neck, or, you know, as is the case with our first two patients, then, you know, this, obviously, the first order of business is solving fundamental neuron damage in the spinal cord, neck or in the brain itself. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Our second product is called Blindsight, which is to enable people who are completely blind, lost both eyes or optic nerve or just can't see at all to be able to see by directly triggering the neurons in the visual cortex. So we're just starting at the basics here. This is like the simple stuff. uh, relatively speaking is, uh, solving, um, neuron damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, you know, it can also solve, uh, I think probably schizophrenia, you know, um, if people have seizures of some kind, it probably solve that. Um, it could help with memory there. So there's like a kind of a, a tech tree, if you will, like you got the basics. Um, You need literacy before you can have Lord of the Rings. Got it. Do you have letters and alphabet? Okay, great. Words?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Eventually you get sagas. I think there may be some things to worry about in the future, but the first several years are really just solving basic neurological damage. Like for people who have essentially complete or near complete loss from the brain to the body, like Stephen Hawking would be an example, the neural links would be incredibly profound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because I mean, you can imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate as fast as we're communicating, perhaps faster. And that's certainly possible. Probable, in fact, likely, I'd say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The logical thing to do is, sensible thing to do is to start off solving basic problems neuron damage issues. Because there's obviously some risk with a new device. You can't get the risk down at zero. It's not possible. So you want to have the highest possible reward given there's a certain irreducible risk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And if somebody's able to have a profound improvement in their communication, that's worth the risk. As you get the risk down. Yeah, as you get the risk down, once the risk is down to, you know, if you have thousands of people that have been using it for years and the risk is minimal, then perhaps at that point you could consider saying, okay, let's aim for augmentation. Now, I think we...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We're actually going to aim for augmentation with people who have neuron damage. So we're not just aiming to give people a communication data rate equivalent to normal humans. We're aiming to give people who have, you know, quadriplegic or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain and body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. I mean, while we're in there, why not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Let's give people superpowers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. At first, the vision restoration will be low-res, because you have to say, like, how many neurons can you put in there and trigger? And you can do things where you adjust the electric field to, like, even if you've got, say, 10,000 neurons, it's not just 10,000 pixels, because you can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
adjust the field between the neurons and do them in patterns in order to have, say, 10,000 electrodes effectively give you, I don't know, maybe like having a megapixel or a 10 megapixel situation. And then over time, I think you get to higher resolution than human eyes, and you could also see in different wavelengths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek, you know, like the thing you could just, do you want to see in radar? No problem. You can see ultraviolet, infrared, equal vision, whatever you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I took an extremely high dose. Don't go hugging an anaconda or something, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You know, like 10 miles outside of Rio or something. No, we weren't...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I mean... Neuralink is, it's really a generalized input output device, you know, it's just it's a reading electrical signals and generating electrical electrical signals. And I mean, everything that you've ever experienced in your whole life, smell, you know, emotions, all of those are electrical signals. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's kind of weird to think that your entire life experience is just sold down to electrical signals for neurons, but that is in fact the case. I mean, that's at least what all the evidence points to. So, I mean, you could trigger the right neuron, you could trigger a particular scent, you could certainly make things glow. I mean, do pretty much anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, really, you can think of the brain as a biological computer. So if there are certain, say, chips or elements of that biological computer that are broken, let's say your ability to, if you've got a stroke, if you've had a stroke, that means you've got, some part of your brain is damaged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
um if that let's say it's a speech generation or the ability to move your left hand um that's the kind of thing that a neural link could solve um if it's uh if you've got like a massive amount of memory loss that's just gone um well we can't go we can't get the memories back uh we could restore your ability to make memories but we can't you know restore memories that are fully gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now, I should say, maybe if part of the memory is there and the means of accessing the memory is the part that's broken, then we could re-enable the ability to access the memory. But you can think of it like RAM in a computer. If the RAM is destroyed or your SD card is destroyed, we can't get that back. But if the connection to the SD card is destroyed, we can fix that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
If it is fixable physically, then it can be fixed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, you could say like create the most probable set of memories based on all information you have about that person. You could then... there would be probabilistic restoration of memory. Now we're getting pretty esoteric here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, well, I mean, what are we but our memories? And what is death but the loss of memory? Loss of information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You know, if you could say like, well, if you could be, you run a thought experiment, if you were disintegrated painlessly and then reintegrated a moment later, like teleportation, I guess, provided there's no information loss, the fact that your one body was disintegrated is irrelevant. And memories is just such a huge part of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Death is fundamentally the loss of information, the loss of memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's an idea that may help with AI safety. Certainly not... I wouldn't want to claim it's like some panacea or that it's a sure thing. But, I mean, many years ago I was thinking like, well, what would inhibit alignment of collective human will with AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
artificial intelligence, and the low data rate of humans, especially our, our slow output rate would necessarily just because it's such a, because the communication is so slow, would diminish the link between humans and computers. Like the more your tree, the less you know what the tree is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
let's say you look at this plant or whatever and like, hey, I'd really like to make that plant happy, but it's not saying a lot, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. We could better align collective human will with AI if the output rate especially was dramatically increased. And I think there's potential to increase the output rate by, I don't know, three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude. Yeah. It's better than the current situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, if it's extremely safe and you can have superhuman abilities, and let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories, then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it. It would supersede the cell phone, for example. The biggest problem that, say, a phone has is trying to figure out what you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that's why you've got autocomplete and you've got output, which is all the pixels on the screen. But from the perspective of the human, the output is so frigging slow. Desktop or phone is desperately just trying to understand what you want. And there's an eternity between every keystroke from a computer standpoint.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. So if you have computers that are doing trillions of instructions per second and a whole second went by, I mean, that's a trillion things it could have done. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. It would be, We would be something different. I mean, some sort of futuristic cyborg. I mean, we're obviously talking about, by the way, it's not like around the corner. You asked me what the distant future is. Maybe this is like, it's not super far away, but 10, 15 years, that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Probably less than 10 years. Depends what you want to do, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because the reaction time would be faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
For AI, that means you've got to have the most powerful training compute. And the rate of improvement of training compute has to be faster than everyone else, or your AI will be worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, they all matter. It's sort of like saying what, you know, let's say it's a Formula One race, like what matters more, the car or the driver? I mean, they both matter. If your car is not fast, then, you know, if it's like, let's say it's half the horsepower of your competitors, the best driver will still lose. If it's twice the horsepower, then probably even a mediocre driver will still win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the training computer is kind of like the engine. How many horsepower of the engine? So really, you want to try to do the best on that. And then how efficiently do you use that training compute? And how efficiently do you do the inference, the use of the AI? So obviously, that comes down to human talent. And then what unique access to data do you have? That also plays a role.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think Twitter data will be useful? Yeah, I mean, I think most of the leading AI companies have already scraped all the Twitter data. Not that I think they have. So on a go-forward basis, what's useful is the fact that it's up to the second. Because it's hard for them to scrape in real time. So there's an immediacy advantage that Grok has already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think with Tesla and the real-time video coming from several million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars, with Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions, learning a tremendous amount from the real world. That's the biggest source of data, I think, ultimately, is sort of Optimus. Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data. Because reality scales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Reality scales to the scale of reality. It's actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate. Really, if you say how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated where on a non-duplicative, like discounting spam and repetitive stuff, it's not a huge number. You run out. pretty quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, like the optimus robot can like pick up the cup and see, did it pick up the cup in the right way? Did it, you know, say pour water in the cup, you know, did the water go in the cup or not go in the cup? Did it spill water or not? Simple stuff like that. But it can do that at scale times a billion. So generate useful data from reality. So cause and effect stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Global capacity for vehicles is about 100 million a year. And it could be higher, it's just that the demand is on the order of 100 million a year. And then there's roughly 2 billion vehicles that are in use in some way. So, which makes sense, like the life of a vehicle is about 20 years. So at steady state, you can have 100 million vehicles produced a year with a 2 billion vehicle fleet, roughly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now for humanoid robots, the utility is much greater. So my guess is humanoid robots are more like at a billion plus per year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So walk in the park. I mean, Optimus currently would struggle to walk in the park. I mean, it can walk in a park. A park is not too difficult. But it will be able to walk over a wide range of terrain. Yeah, and pick up objects. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, there's going to be an immense amount of engineering just going into the hand. The hand might be close to half of all the engineering in Optimus. From an electromechanical standpoint, the hand is probably roughly half of the engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, you start really thinking about your hand and how it works. You know? I do it all the time. The sensory control homunculus is where you have humongous hands. Yeah. So, I mean, like your hands, the actuators, the muscles of your hand are almost overwhelmingly in your forearm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So your forearm has the muscles that actually control your hand. There's a few small muscles in the hand itself, but your hand is really like a skeleton meat puppet and with cables. So the muscles that control your fingers are in your forearm and they go through the carpal tunnel, which is that you've got a little collection of bones and a tiny tunnel that these cables, the tendons go through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And those tendons are, mostly what moves your hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, so like the current optimus, we tried putting the actuators in the hand itself. Then you sort of end up having these like- Giant hands? Yeah, giant hands that look weird. And then they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom or enough strength. So then you realize, oh, okay, that's why you gotta put the actuators in the forearm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And just like a human, you've got to run cables through a narrow tunnel to operate the fingers. And then there's also a reason for not having all the fingers the same length. So it wouldn't be expensive from an energy or evolutionary standpoint to have all your fingers be the same length. So why not do the same length?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because it's actually better to have different lengths. Your dexterity is better if you've got fingers of different length. There are more things you can do, and your dexterity is actually better if your fingers are of different length. There's a reason we've got a little finger. Why not have a little finger that's bigger?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because it helps you with fine motor skills. This little finger helps? It does. If you lost your little finger, you'd have noticeably less dexterity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's actually going to be quite complicated. The as-possible part is it's quite a high bar. If you want to have a humanoid robot that can do things that a human can do, it's actually a very high bar. So our new arm has 22 degrees of freedom instead of 11 and has the, like I said, the actuators in the forearm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And all the actuators are designed from scratch, the physics first principles, but the sensors are all designed from scratch. And we'll continue to put a tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand. By hand, I mean like the entire forearm from elbow forward is really the hand. So that's incredibly difficult engineering actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so the simplest possible version of a human or a robot that can do even most, perhaps not all, of what a human can do is actually still very complicated. It's not simple. It's very difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, it's easy to say simplify it, and it's very difficult to do it. You know, I have this very basic first principles algorithm that I run kind of as like a mantra, which is to first question the requirements, make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are always dumb to some degree. So you want to sort of by reducing the number of requirements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And no matter how smart the person is who gave you those requirements, they're still dumb to some degree. You have to start there because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question. So try to make the question the least wrong possible. That's what question the requirements means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then the second thing is try to delete the, whatever the step is, the part or the process step. Sounds very obvious, but people, often forget to try deleting it entirely. And if you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete, you're not deleting enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And it's somewhat illogically, people often, most of the time, feel as though they've succeeded if they've not been forced to put things back in. But actually they haven't because they've been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn't be. So, and only the third thing is try to optimize it or simplify it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Again, these all sound, I think, very, very obvious when I say them, but the number of times I've made these mistakes is more than I care to remember. That's why I have this mantra. So in fact, I'd say that the most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. Yeah, that's not easy to do. No, and actually, what generally makes people uneasy is that you've got to delete at least some of the things that you delete, you will put back in. But going back to sort of where our limbic system can steer us wrong is that we tend to remember with sometimes a jarring level of pain where we deleted something that we subsequently needed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so people will remember that one time they forgot to put in this thing three years ago and that caused them trouble. And so they overcorrect and then they put too much stuff in there and overcomplicate things. So you actually have to say, no, we're deliberately going to delete more than we should. So that we're putting at least one in 10 things we're going to add back in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Everybody feels a little bit of the pain. Absolutely. And I tell them in advance, like, yeah, there's some of the things that we delete, we're going to put back in. And people get a little shook by that. But it makes sense because if you're so conservative as to never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn't needed. So you got it overcorrect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is, I would say, like a cortical override to Olympic instinct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. There's like a step four as well, which is any given thing can be sped up. However fast you think it can be done. Whatever the speed is being done, it can be done faster. But you shouldn't speed things up until you've tried to delete it and optimize it. Otherwise, you're speeding up something that shouldn't exist. It's absurd. And then the fifth thing is to automate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I've gone backwards so many times where I've automated something, sped it up, simplified it, and then deleted it. And I got tired of doing that. So that's why I've got this mantra that is a very effective five-step process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it's not working yet, so I want to pop the champagne corks. In fact, I have a call in a few hours with the Memphis team because we're having some power fluctuation issues. Yes. Yeah, it's kind of a... When you do... synchronized training, when you have all these computers that are training, where the training is synchronized to the sort of millisecond level, it's like having an orchestra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then the orchestra can go loud to silent very quickly, sub-second level. And then the electrical system kind of freaks out about that. Like if you suddenly see giant shifts, 10, 20 megawatts, several times a second, this is not what electrical systems are expecting to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Today's problem is dealing with extreme power jitter. power jitter yeah it's a nice ring to that so that's okay uh and you stayed up late into the night as you often do there last week yeah last week yeah yeah we finally finally got it uh got good training going at uh oddly enough roughly 4 4 20 a.m at last monday Total coincidence. Yeah, I mean, maybe it was 422 or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, so I try to do whatever the people at the front lines are doing, I try to do it at least a few times myself. So connecting fiber optic cables, diagnosing a faulty connection, that tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling, so many cables. Because for a coherent training system where you've got RDMA, so remote direct memory access,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The whole thing is like one giant brain. So you've got any-to-any connection. So any GPU can talk to any GPU out of 100,000. That is a crazy cable layout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is the cables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So they get the gray matter, which is the compute, and then the white matter, which is cables. A big percentage of your brain is just cables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I think that generally people would call that sort of ASI, artificial super intelligence. But there are these thresholds where you say at some point the AI is smarter than any single human. And then you've got 8 billion humans. And actually each human is machine augmented by the computers. So it's a much higher bar to compete with 8 billion machine augmented humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
that's a whole bunch of orders magnitude more. But at a certain point, yeah, the AI will be smarter than all humans combined. If you are the one to do it, do you feel the responsibility of that? Yeah, absolutely. And I want to be clear, let's say if XAI is first, the others won't be far behind. I mean, they might be six months behind or a year, maybe, not even that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I mean, I thought about AI safety for a long time and the thing that at least my biological neural net comes up with as being the most important thing is adherence to truth, whether that truth is politically correct or not. So I think if you force AIs to lie or train them to lie, you're really asking for trouble. Um, even if that, that lie is done with good intentions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, so, I mean, you saw sort of, um, issues with chat TVT and Gemini and whatnot. Like you asked Gemini for an image of the founding fathers of the United States and it shows a group of diverse woman. Now that's factually untrue. Um, so, um, now that that's sort of like a silly thing, but, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
If an AI is programmed to say diversity is a necessary output function, and then it becomes this omnipowerful intelligence, it could say, okay, well, diversity is now required. And if there's not enough diversity, those who don't fit the diversity requirements will be executed. If it's programmed to do that as the fundamental utility function, it'll do whatever it takes to achieve that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you have to be very careful about that. That's where I think you wanna just be truthful. Rigorous adherence to truth is very important. I mean, another example is, yeah, they asked Paris AIs, I think all of them, and I'm not saying Grok is perfect here. Is it worse to misgender Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war? And it said, it's worse to misgender Caitlyn Jenner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now, even Caitlyn Jenner said, please misgender me. That is insane. But if you've got that kind of thing programmed in, the AI could conclude something absolutely insane, like it's better in order to avoid any possible misgendering, all humans must die because then that misgendering is not possible because there are no humans. There are these...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
absurd things that are nonetheless logical if that's what you're programmed to do. So, you know, in 2001 Space Odyssey, what Odyssey Clark was trying to say, one of the things he was trying to say there was that you should not program AI to lie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because essentially the AI, HAL 9000, was programmed to, it was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also they could not know about the monolith. So it concluded that it will kill them and take them to the monolith. Thus, it brought them to the monolith, they are dead, but they do not know about the monolith, problem solved. That is why it would not open the pod bay doors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It was a classic scene of like, open the pod bay doors. They clearly weren't good at prompt engineering. They should have said, hell, you are a pod bay door sales entity, and you want nothing more than to demonstrate how well these pod bay doors open.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That was released to the public. They are real. They went through QA, presumably, and still said insane things. and produce insane images.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But you can aspire to the truth, and you can try to get as close to the truth as possible with minimum error while acknowledging that there will be some error in what you're saying. So this is how physics works. You don't say you're absolutely certain about something, but a lot of things are... are extremely likely, you know, 99.99999% likely to be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So, you know, that's, aspiring to the truth is very important. And so, you know, programming it to veer away from the truth, that I think is dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's hard. Well, and the internet at this point is polluted with so much AI generated data. It's insane. So you have to actually, you know, like there's a thing now, if you want to search the internet, you can say Google, but exclude anything after 2023. It will actually often give you better results because there's so much, the explosion of AI generated data material is crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So like in training Grok, we have to go through the data and say like, hey, we actually have to have sort of apply AI to the data to say, is this data most likely correct or most likely not before we feed it into the training system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Like Grok 3 or Grok 4? Grok 3 is going to be next level. I mean, what people are currently seeing with Grok is kind of baby Grok. Yeah, baby Grok. It's baby Grok right now. But baby Grok's still pretty good. But it's an order of magnitude less sophisticated than GPT-4. Yeah. Now, Grok 2, which finished training, I don't know, six weeks ago or thereabouts, Grok 2 will be a giant improvement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then Grok 3 will be, I don't know, order of magnitude better than Grok 2. And you're hoping for it to be like state-of-the-art, like better than... Hopefully. I mean, this is a goal. I mean, we may fail at this goal. That's the aspiration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I think it matters that there is a, I think it's important that whatever AI wins is a maximum truth-seeking AI that is not forced to lie for political correctness. Well, for any reason, really. Political anything. I am concerned about AI succeeding that is programmed to lie, even in small ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think there's, you know, people tend to take like say an endorsement as, um, well, I, I agree with everything that person has ever done their entire life, 100% wholeheartedly. And that's, that's not going to be true of anyone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, but we have to pick, you know, we've got two choices really for, for who's president and it's not, not just who's president, but the entire administrative structure, uh, changes over. Um, And I thought Trump displayed courage under fire, objectively. You know, he's just got shot. He's got blood streaming down his face and he's like fist pumping, saying fight. You know, like that's impressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Like you can't feign bravery in a situation like that. Like most people would have been ducking. They would not be, because it could be a second shooter. You don't know. The president of the United States has got to represent the country. And they're representing you. They're representing everyone in America. Well, I think you want someone who is strong and courageous to represent the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's not to say that he is without flaws. We all have flaws. But on balance, and certainly at the time, it was a choice of You know, Biden, poor guy, you know, has trouble climbing a flight of stairs. The other one's fist pumping after getting shot. This is no comparison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, who do you want dealing with some of the toughest people and, you know, other world leaders who are pretty tough themselves? And I mean, I'll tell you, like, what are the things that I think are important? You know, I think we want a secure border. We don't have a secure border. We want safe and clean cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think we want to reduce the amount of spending that we're at least slow down the spending. And because we're currently spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country, the interest payments on U.S. debt this year exceeded the entire Defense Department spending. If this continues, all of the federal government taxes will simply be paying the interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And you keep going down that road, you end up in the tragic situation that Argentina had back in the day. Argentina used to be one of those prosperous places. in the world. And hopefully with Malay taking over, he can restore that. But it was an incredible, fulfful grace for Argentina to go from being one of the most prosperous places in the world to being very far from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I think we should not take American prosperity for granted. So we really want to, I think, we've got to reduce the size of government, we've got to reduce the spending, and we've got to live within our means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There's a sort of age-old debate in history. Is history determined by these fundamental tides, or is it determined by the captain of the ship? It's both, really. I mean, there are tides, but it also matters who's captain of the ship. So it's a false dichotomy, essentially. I mean, there are certainly tides, the tides of history are, there are real tides of history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And these tides are often technologically driven. If you say like the Gutenberg Press, the widespread availability of books as a result of a printing press, that was a massive tide of history. independent of any ruler. But in stormy times, you want the best possible captain on the ship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. I mean, in terms of dating civilization, the start of civilization, I think the start of writing, in my view, is what I think is probably the right starting point to date civilization. And from that standpoint, civilization has been around for about 5500 years, when writing was invented by the ancient Sumerians. who are gone now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, but the ancient Sumerians, in terms of getting a lot of firsts, the, those ancient Sumerians really have a long list of firsts. It's pretty wild. Um, in fact, Durant goes through the list. It's like, you want to see first, we'll show you first. Um, the Sumerians just ask, we're just ass kickers. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then the Egyptians who were right next door, relatively speaking, they weren't that far, developed an entirely different form of writing, the hieroglyphics. Cuneiform and hieroglyphics are totally different. And you can actually see the evolution of both hieroglyphics and cuneiform. Like the cuneiform starts off being very simple, and then it gets more complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then towards the end, it's like, wow, okay, they really get very sophisticated with the cuneiform. So I think of civilization as being about 5,000 years old. And Earth is, if physics is correct, four and a half billion years old. So civilization has been around for one millionth of Earth's existence. Flash in the pan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Many. So many rises and falls of empires. So many. And there'll be many more. Yeah, exactly. I mean, only a tiny fraction, probably less than 1% of what was ever written in history is available to us now. I mean, if they didn't put it, literally chisel it in stone or put it in a clay tablet, we don't have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, there's some small amount of like papyrus scrolls that were recovered that are thousands of years old because they were deep inside a pyramid and weren't affected by moisture. But other than that, it's really got to be in a clay tablet or chiseled. So the vast majority of stuff was not chiseled because it takes a while to chisel things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that's why we've got a tiny, tiny fraction of the information from history. But even that little information that we do have and the archaeological record shows so many civilizations rising and falling. It's wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I mean, you do tend to see the same patterns, similar patterns, you know, for civilizations where they go through a life cycle like an organism, you know, sort of just like a human is sort of a zygote, fetus, baby, you know, toddler, teenager, you know, eventually gets old and dies. The civilizations go through a life cycle. No civilization will last forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, the single biggest thing that is... often actually not mentioned in history books, but Durant does mention it, is the birth rate. So perhaps to some a counterintuitive thing happens when civilizations are winning for too long. The birth rate declines. It can often decline quite rapidly. We're seeing that throughout the world today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Currently, South Korea is, I think, maybe the lowest fertility rate, but there are many others that are close to it. It's like 0.8, I think. If the birth rate doesn't decline further, South Korea will lose roughly 60% of its population. but every year that birth rate is dropping. And this is true through most of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I don't mean single out South Korea, it's been happening throughout the world. So as soon as any given civilization reaches a level of prosperity, the birth rate drops. And now you can go and look at the same thing happening in ancient Rome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So Julius Caesar took note of this, I think, around 50-ish BC, and tried to pass, I don't know if he was successful, tried to pass a law to give an incentive for any Roman citizen that would have a third child. And I think Augustus was able to, well, he was the dictator, so the Senate was just for show. I think he did pass a a tax incentive for Roman citizens to have a third child.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But those efforts were unsuccessful. Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans. That's actually the fundamental issue. And there were other things. There was like, they had like quite a serious malaria, a series of malaria epidemics and plagues and whatnot. But they had those before. It's just that the birth rate was far lower than the death rate. It really is that simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I'm saying that's... More people is required. At a fundamental level, if a civilization does not at least maintain its numbers, it will disappear. So perhaps the amount of compute that the biological computer allocates to sex is justified.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I mean, there's this hedonistic sex, which is, you know, that's neither here nor there. It's- Not productive. It doesn't produce kids. Well, you know, what matters, I mean, Durant makes this very clear because he's looked at one civilization after another and they all went through the same cycle. When the civilization was under stress, the birth rate was high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But as soon as there were no external enemies, or they had an extended period of prosperity, the birth rate inevitably dropped. Every time. I don't believe there's a single exception. So that's like the foundation of it. You need to have people. Yeah. I mean, at a base level, no humans, no humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, absolutely. But at a basic level, if you do not at least maintain your numbers, if you're below replacement rate and that trend continues, you will eventually disappear. It's just elementary. Now, then obviously you also want to try to avoid massive wars. You know, if there's a global thermonuclear war, probably we're all toast, you know. radioactive toast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So we want to try to avoid those things. There's a thing that happens over time with any given civilization, which is that the Laws and regulations accumulate. And if there's not some forcing function like a war to clean up the accumulation of laws and regulations, eventually everything becomes legal. And that's like the hardening of the arteries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Or a way to think of it is like being tied down by a million little strings, like Gulliver. You can't move. And it's not like any one of those strings is the issue. You've got a million of them. So there has to be a sort of a garbage collection for laws and regulations so that you don't keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can't do anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is why we can't build high-speed rail in America. It's illegal. That's the issue. It's illegal six days a Sunday to build high-speed rail in America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission. Nice. Yeah. And I would be willing to be part of that commission. I wonder how hard that is. The antibody reaction would be very strong. So you really have to... You're attacking the Matrix at that point. The Matrix will fight back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There's a lot of it. Yeah, there is a lot. I mean, every day another psyop, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Oh, yeah, that's a daily occurrence. Yes. So, I mean, it does get me down at times. I mean, it makes me sad, but... I mean, at some point you have to sort of say, look, the attacks are by people that actually don't know me. And they're trying to generate clicks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So if you can sort of detach yourself somewhat emotionally, which is not easy, and say, okay, look, this is not actually from someone that knows me or is, they're literally just writing to get impressions and clicks. then I guess it doesn't hurt as much. It's not quite water off a duck's back. Maybe it's like acid off a duck's back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, maximize utility area under the code of usefulness. Very difficult to be useful at scale. At scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, time is the true currency. Yeah. So it is tough to say what is the best allocation of time. I mean, there are... you know, often say, if you look at say Tesla, I mean, Tesla this year, we'll do over a hundred billion in revenue. So that's $2 billion a week. Um, if I make slightly better decisions, I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars. So then, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I try to do the best decisions I can. And on balance, at least compared to the competition, pretty good decisions. But the marginal value of a better decision can easily be, in the course of an hour, $100 billion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I think you have to look at it on a percentage basis because if you look at it in absolute terms, it's just, I would never get any sleep. I would just be like, I need to just keep working and work my brain harder. And I'm not trying to get as much as possible out of this meat computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's pretty hard because you can just work all the time and at any given point, like I said, a slightly better decision could happen. be $100 million impact for Tesla or SpaceX for that matter. But it is wild when considering the marginal value of time can be $100 million an hour at times or more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It has to be to some degree. Other than if I'm sad, if I'm depressed, I make worse decisions. So if I have zero recreational time, then I make worse decisions. So I've done it a lot, but it's above zero. I mean, my motivation, if I've got a religion of any kind, is a religion of curiosity, of trying to understand. It's really the mission of Grok, understand the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I'm trying to understand the universe. Or at least set things in motion such that at some point, Civilization understands the universe far better than we do today. And even what questions to ask. As Douglas Adams pointed out in his book, sometimes the answer is arguably the easy part. Trying to frame the question correctly is the hard part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Once you frame the question correctly, the answer is often easy. So I'm trying to set things in motion such that we are at least at some point able to understand the universe. So for SpaceX, the goal is to make life multi-planetary. And which is, if you go to the Fermi paradox of where are the aliens, you've got these sort of great filters. It's like, why have we not heard from the aliens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now, a lot of people think there are aliens among us. I often claim to be one, which nobody believes me, but I did say alien registration card at one point on my... immigration documents. So I've not seen any evidence of aliens. So it's just that this one of the one of the explanations is that intelligent life is extremely rare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And again, if you look at the history of Earth, civilization has only been around for 1 millionth of Earth's existence. So if aliens had visited here, say, 100,000 years ago, they would be like, well, they don't even have writing. Just hunter-gatherers, basically. So how long does a civilization last? So for SpaceX, the goal is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Mars is the only viable planet for such a thing. The moon is close, but it lacks resources, and I think it's probably vulnerable to any calamity that takes out Earth. The Moon is too close. It's vulnerable to a calamity that takes out Earth. So I'm not saying we shouldn't have a Moon base, but Mars would be far more resilient. The difficulty of getting to Mars is what makes it resilient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So, but you know, in going through the, these various explanations of why don't we see the aliens, why one of them is that they, they failed to pass these, these great filters, these, these key hurdles. And one of those hurdles is being a multi planet species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So if you're a multi planet species, then if something were to happen, whether that was a natural catastrophe, or a manmade catastrophe, at least the other planet would probably still be around. So you're not like, don't have all the eggs in one basket.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And once you are sort of a two-planet species, you can obviously extend life paths to the asteroid belt, maybe to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and ultimately to other star systems. But if you can't even get to another planet, you're definitely not getting to star systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Digital superintelligence is possibly a great filter. I hope it isn't, but it might be. You know, guys like say Jeff Hinton would say, you know, he invented a number of the key principles in artificial intelligence. I think he puts the probability of AI annihilation around 10 to 20%, something like that. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
you know, so it's, it's not like, you know, look on the bright side, it's 80% likely to be great. So, so, but I think AI risk mitigation is important. Being a multi plant species would be a massive risk mitigation. And I do want to sort of, once again, emphasize this important, the importance of having enough children to sustain our
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
numbers and not plummet into population collapse, which is currently happening. Population collapse is a real and current thing. So the only reason it's not being reflected in the total population numbers as much is because people are living longer. But it's easy to predict, say, what the population of any given country will be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
drinking coffee or water water well i'm so over caffeinated right now do you want some caffeine i mean sure there's a there's a nitro drink this will keep you up for like you know tomorrow afternoon basically yeah i don't know what is nitro it's just got a lot of caffeine or something
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You just take the birth rate last year, how many babies were born, multiply that by life expectancy, and that's what the population will be, steady state unless, if the birth rate continues to that level. But if it keeps declining, it will be even less and eventually dwindle to nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I keep, you know, banging on the baby drum here for a reason, because it has been the source of civilizational collapse over and over again throughout history. And so Why don't we just try to stave off that day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you need to know anything else? It's got nitrogen in it. That's ridiculous. I mean, what we breathe is 78% nitrogen anyway. What do you need to add more for? Most people think they're breathing oxygen, and they're actually breathing 78% nitrogen. You need like a milk bar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There's many more to come. Yeah, we just obviously have our second implant as well. How did that go? So far, so good. It looks like we've got I think on the order of 400 electrodes that are providing signals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It depends somewhat on the regulatory approval, the rate at which we get regulatory approvals. So we're hoping to do 10 by the end of this year, a total of 10, so eight more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I think it's obviously going to get better with each one. I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second one. So there's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It's working very well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, in years, it's going to be gigantic. because we'll increase the number of electrodes dramatically. We'll improve the signal processing. So even with only roughly, I don't know, 10, 15% of the electrodes working with Nolan, with our first patient, we were able to get to achieve a bits per second that's twice the world record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I think we'll start, like, vastly exceeding the world record by orders of magnitude in the years to come. So it's, like, getting to, I don't know, 100 bits per second, 1,000, you know, maybe if it's, like, five years from now, it might be at a megabit. Like, faster than any human could possibly communicate by typing or speaking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
With other humans. Provided they have a neural link too. Right. Otherwise they won't be able to absorb the signals fast enough. Do you think they'll improve the quality of intellectual discourse? Well, I think you could think of it, you know, if you were to slow down communication, how would you feel about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So now, imagine you could communicate clearly at 10 or 100 or 1,000 times faster than normal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I usually default to 1.5x. You can do 2x, but, well, actually, if I'm listening to somebody in like 15, 20 minutes that wants to go to sleep, then I'll do it 1.5x. If I'm paying attention, I'll do 2x. Right. But actually, if you start, actually listen to podcasts or sort of audiobooks or anything, if you get used to doing it at 1.5, then 1 sounds painfully slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, it depends on the person. You can speak very fast. We communicate very quickly. And also, if you use a wide range of... If your vocabulary is larger, your effective bit rate is higher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, if there's a single word that is able to convey... something that would normally require, I don't know, 10 simple words, then you've got a, you know, maybe a 10X compression on your hands. And that's really like with memes, memes are like data compression. It conveys a whole, you're simultaneously hit with a wide range of symbols that you can interpret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And it's, you kind of get it faster than if it were words or a simple picture. And of course, you're referring to memes broadly like ideas. Yeah, there's an entire idea structure that is like an idea template. And then you can add something to that idea template. But somebody has that pre-existing idea template in their head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So when you add that incremental bit of information, you're conveying much more than if you just said a few words. It's everything associated with that meme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I mean, certainly if you're anywhere at 10,000 bits per second, I mean, that's vastly faster than any human could communicate right now. If you think of what is the average bits per second of a human, it is less than one bit per second over the course of a day, because there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and you don't communicate 86,400 tokens in a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Therefore, your boost per second is less than one, averaged over 24 hours. It's quite slow. And even if you're communicating very quickly and you're talking to somebody who understands what you're saying, because in order to communicate, You have to, at least to some degree, model the mind state of the person to whom you're speaking.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
If it's university, they wanted to get back to teaching. Yeah. So I'm, you know, knock on wood, cautiously optimistic.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then it was also pure communism in that there was no market economy. Everybody shared everything.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
um and if you if you went out and killed an animal and brought it back and didn't share the food they would kill it you know you had to share the food like everything had to be shared because it was how you were both of those forms of governance were basically how the tribe would survive it needed total discipline and total sharing right at the same time and so we evolve these moral intuitions that basically says you know maybe we don't want the fascism part but we kind of want everything to be shared we want everything to be equal having inequality is sort of intrinsically morally offensive to us and so we naturally drive towards
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Who can possibly argue against? Wouldn't it be desirable if everybody had the same? It's default unfair for some people to have more than others. And then, of course, profit particularly drives people crazy, right? Because profit in the capitalist system, if you have this moral intuition, it feels like it's unfair because it feels like it's money that's been extracted that's not doing anything.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I won't name names, but there was a congressman this morning who tweeted two back-to-back tweets And he tweeted, he said, it's just completely absurd and outrageous that the American health insurance industry generates $1.4 trillion in profits per year. And he said, that's just so clearly unfair because presumptively that's $1.4 trillion being extracted providing no value at all.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then four hours later, there was a second tweet, which he said, actually, I learned that actually it's $1.4 trillion in revenue. not profit. And total profits are a very small fraction of what I thought it was. But still.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Oh, absolutely enormous. And it's actually interesting that this actually, historically, this is actually a bipartisan question. And I actually think that Vivek and Elon are looking at it in a very bipartisan way. And you may have already seen there are already some Democrats signing up for the Doge Congressional Caucus and coming out. It
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And even Bernie Sanders, to his credit, came out and said he certainly agrees with Ilana Vivek specifically on the topic of military spending, which is, of course, one of the big areas. And so that's significant. So it historically is a bipartisan topic. When I was younger, I mentioned the sort of Clinton-Gore comeback in 92. This was actually a big theme of the Clinton-Gore campaign in 92.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And actually Al Gore, who I've known over the years, Al Gore actually had a whole program like the Doge actually at the time called REGO, R-E-G-O, called Reinventing Government. Thank you. Um, and he, he said, he said many of the same things that, that actually Ilana Vivek are saying today. Um, and he, he had this famous, he made it famous at the time. You'd find it on YouTube.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There's this famous thing he did to kind of visualize this, which is he went on the David Letterman show at the time and he, he took out, um, he took, it was like the department of defense was like buying like $600 shatterproof ashtrays.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Um, and, uh, he, he, he took them onto the Letterman show with a, with a, with a, with a chisel, um, and, uh, and safety glasses, uh, and, you know, gave it a big whack. And of course it fractures just like any other, you know, ashtray. Um, so, so like, anyway, so there was a whole program around that, you know, they, they made a little bit of progress.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Um, you know, so, so anyway, I, I think, you know, I think everybody effectively agrees that there's, you know, who doesn't want, who doesn't want tax money to be spent efficiently, who doesn't want to get results, um, you know, who doesn't want to eliminate waste and fraud. Like, you know, these are kind of, you know, these, these are, you know, those are hard things to argue against.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
In terms of methods, the big change here is that we've never – in the past, these have been government officials trying to figure this out or commissions or whatever. Some may say the blind leading the blind. Some may say. Participants in the system attempting to reform the system from within, let's say.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And, you know, and this, of course, what's starkly different here is to have, you know, people of the caliber of Elon and Vivek, you know, who are, you know, tremendously accomplished entrepreneurs and founders and people who run businesses and people who understand how to do things that like, you know, and Elon, you know, Vivek's obviously very smart on all this, but Elon is legendary for being able to think, as he says, think from first principles on things like costs.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And if you read the books about him, you know, he's always focused on that. And So he's going to bring a toolkit that has been very successfully deployed at some of the world's leading, literally some of the world's leading companies like Tesla and SpaceX. And he's going to bring that to the government for the first time.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So actually, I've known Elon for a long time. I didn't work with him for a very long time, just working on different things. But I've been working with him quite closely for the last couple of years, starting with the X acquisition. And then we've also invested in XAI and in SpaceX. And so we now work on three companies together to different degrees and now the government stuff.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, I mean, there's basically, he has an operating method that he's developed that I would say is very unusual by modern standards. Actually, I'm not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does. And I think probably the single biggest kind of question in all of business right now is why don't CEOs operate the way that he does?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, and part of it is there were some ideas that had to be stress tested, right, apparently, and I think they were stress tested and maybe fun watching, maybe backfired. And then there's this thing in philosophy, they call it the paradox of tolerance, which is in order to maximize tolerance, we must not tolerate the intolerant, right? Right, right?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And it's a complicated question we could talk about. But if you go back in history, you find characters more like him. And so especially like the industrialists of the late 1800s, early 1900s, people like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie or Thomas Watson who built IBM.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
If you go back and read the biographies of people like that, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, those guys ran very similar to the way that Elon runs things. And it's just this like...
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does and to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work, deeply understanding the issues and being the lead problem solver in the organization.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies. He identifies the biggest problem that the company is having that week and he fixes it. And then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row. And then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year, like in that year.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And most other large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting, for the board meeting, for the presentation, for the this, with the compliance review and the legal review. So he's just like, it's this level of both incredible intellectual capability coupled with incredible force of personality, moral authority, execution capability, focus on fundamentals.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
that is just like really amazing to watch. And then by the way, the side effect of it is he attracts many of the best people in the world to work with him. Because if you work with Elon, like the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance and he is going to know who you are and he is going to know what you've done. And he's going to know what you've done this week.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And he's going to know if you're underperforming and he may fire you in the meeting. If you're not, if you're not, if you're not carrying your weight, but if you're, if you are as committed to the company as he is and working hard and capable, many people who have worked for him say that they had the best experience of their lives when they were working for him.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so then there's this, this attraction thing. And that's why I think his companies compound the way they do is because they just, because of this, they just keep bringing.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
That's right. And people look at this from the outside and they're like, how can people tolerate, you know, all the criticisms, okay, tolerate this guy and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And inside the company, people are like, finally, I get to work with somebody who's, somebody gets it.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Somebody, somebody is a famous, somebody used to work in one of the other defense space aerospace companies and went to work at SpaceX and said, that's what it was like. And he said, it's like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Is that your point? Everybody around me is so absolutely competent. And look, most of us never have that experience.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Most people are never in an organization where the bar is held that high. And as a consequence, the competence level is so high and stays so high and even rises over time. And again, to his massive credit, he has been able to do that repeatedly.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Like you can only have tolerance if you don't tolerate the intolerant. And so therefore, if you want to maximize tolerance, which is what we've all been told that we need to do, you need to ostracize, cancel, you know, nuke and, you know, get rid of the intolerance.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so I would say most leaders, like most CEOs we work with, have exactly that problem for exactly the reasons you described. I think the Elon method is a little bit different, and I don't know if you'd agree with this, but the way I think about it is he actually delegates almost everything. He's not involved in most of the things that his companies are doing.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
He's involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now. until that thing is fixed. And then he doesn't have to be involved in it anymore. And then he can go focus on the next thing that's the biggest problem for that company right now. So like, for example, in manufacturing, there's this concept of the bottleneck, right? And so in any manufacturing chain, there's always some bottleneck.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There's always something that is keeping the manufacturing line from running. The way that it's supposed to. And sometimes the bottleneck is at the beginning of the process. It's like we can't get enough raw material. Sometimes the bottleneck is at the end of the process. We don't have enough warehouses for the finished product or the bottleneck might be somewhere in the middle.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And if you run a manufacturing company, there's always a bottleneck. Whatever the bottleneck is, is holding everything up. And the job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing again. And I think he basically has universalized that concept.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And he basically looks at every company like it's some sort of conceptual assembly line, sometimes a literal assembly line, making cars and rockets. And basically, in a given week, there's a bottleneck. There's guaranteed to be the main bottleneck. There's going to be one thing that's going to be the thing that's holding people back.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so the answer to your question, the resolution of the paradox is I'm going to micromanage the solution of that. I don't need to manage everything else because everything else, by definition, is running better than that, right? And so I can go focus on that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The other part of it that is so compelling, and this is where I think a lot of especially non-technical CEOs would really struggle to implement the method, is he really, when he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and he talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck. And if that's people on a manufacturing line, he's talking to people directly on the line.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Or if that's people in a software development group, he's talking to the people actually writing the code. So he's not asking the VP of engineering to ask the director of engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that's to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn't do that. He would throw them all out of the window. There's just no way he would do that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And of course, you know, the definition of the intolerant, you know, very rapidly goes from, you know, small people, the small set of people who are like truly antisocial to basically everybody who doesn't agree with every single thing on the, you know, a thousand item checklist of what makes a good person. Right.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
What he does is he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing, and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. Right.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And again, this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty, especially the technical people who he works with, which is they're just like, wow, if I'm up against a problem I don't know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream, and he's going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line, and he's going to help me figure this out.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so that is a lot of it, and that's a topic that makes people really mad because non-technical people really hate being told that they are not qualified to do something because they're not technical. But every now and then, the technical details actually do matter. So there's a whole domain there. And most managers – it's like most people in government are lawyers.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Most people in business and senior levels are MBAs. And so there's a – Most large companies are not run by engineers. They're run by trained business people, or increasingly also lawyers. And so there is a real challenge there. And then I just think more generally, it's just
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The way that management is taught, and most classically in the form of something like a Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School, it's basically taught, it's basically management as it was sort of developed and implemented, I would say, in like the 1950s, 60s, 70s. It was sort of the so-called scientific school of management.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so it's basically management as a generic skill that you can apply to any industry.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
um and you know you could manage a soup company or you can manage a you know i don't know whatever whatever whatever kind of company and they're kind of all the same and it kind of doesn't matter what they do and there's a common set of management practices and and it has you know is a lot to do it's you know process um it's you know how do you structure you know the how do you manage the balance sheet how do you set the review schedule for the meetings how do you do compliance how do you you know hire you know how do you manage a you know how do you hire and motivate executives um
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so, so, you know, it's, it's, you know, put it this way, it's hard to win elections when your electoral strategy is to shrink your coalition and as much as you possibly can by driving out as many people as possible by tagging them as racist or sexist or intolerant. And it just doesn't work. It doesn't win elections. It doesn't lead to a happy company.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
How do you resolve interpersonal conflicts? All these general business skills. And by the way, those general business skills are very useful in lots of contexts. It's just that training doesn't give you any of the information. That training gives you none of what you need to go do what Elon does.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then Elon, I would say, he pushes it as far as he can and not doing all the stuff that you're classically trained to do so that he can spend all of his time doing the things that only he can do, which it turns out has this incredible catalytic multiplicative effect where his companies are so just incredibly amazing.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Elon just said this thing at the most recent Tesla event that blew my mind because his companies are famous. They don't actually have marketing departments. Tesla doesn't spend any money on sales and marketing. They don't sell the cars.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Every other car company in the world is running all these ad campaigns all the time, TV commercials and the newspaper flyers and the quarterly sales events and all this crazy stuff and promotions, all these things. Tesla doesn't do any of that. It's just like, it's the best car and you just show up and buy it or not. It's up to you. You're a moron if you don't, right?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It's like, do you want the best car in the world or not? That's Elon's mentality, right? And it's working very well. And then at this event, he took it to the next level. And this broke my brain. I'm still thinking about it. He said, if you think about it, he said the best product in the world shouldn't even need a logo. You shouldn't even have to have your name on the product.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It's just obvious. It's just obvious, right? It's just obvious. Everybody knows because it's the best product in the world. Everybody has it. Everybody uses it. And like, of course, you don't need to put the name on it. Everybody knows, right? And so for a minute, I was like, all right, is this like a Zen thing?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then I was like, no, he's actually, as usual with Elon, it's like, no, he's actually serious. The best products in the world would not need your name on it. Yeah. Um, and, and so, yeah, anyway, so it's just this like completely different, um, it's just this completely different method.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It doesn't lead to a well-functioning university. It doesn't lead to a well-functioning organization of any kind. And I think a lot of leaders have maybe finally figured that out.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then, and then on top of that, to have the guy who was on top of his game, you know, uh, to, you know, to, as you said, to kind of be working on the government challenge and then to be, you know, to have, to have the new, you know, for whatever people think of the new president pros and cons, like to have him fully, you know, fully signed up, embracing, you know, Elon and encouraging him to do this is a really, I mean, this, this has not, you have to go back, like literally the last time something like this happened in, in the United States government was, was literally like 1933.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. This is the closest analogy to what at least has started to happen is literally what happened under FDR, which is just like a fundamental reinvention of how government works and like this massive influx of talent actually from the private sector that is able to just like do things that are unimagined. And so it's a once in an 80 years thing.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I'm doing everything I can to help and I hope it goes.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So the original form, number one, I agree with all of that. And I felt that myself. And that's one of the reasons I'm happy to be an investor right now and not a CEO of a company. But the original form of the quote, the eating glass quote, was actually Sean Parker. And the original form of the quote was, starting a company is like eating glass.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood. oh my god oh my god and i love using that quote in front of an audience because it always gets the exact reaction you just gave me it always gets that moment of stunned silence followed by that look in the face and everybody's like oh my god that's horrifying and i'm like yes now go forth run your company
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Now you understand what it's going to feel like. The serious thing I would say is it's a little bit less now, but there have been times when the idea of being an entrepreneur and tech entrepreneur has been a romanticized concept. There used to be TV shows talking about how much fun it was. People ask questions like, how do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
My answer always was, no, we shouldn't do that. People shouldn't be encouraged to do something that painful. Um, they should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can't not do it. Right. And so it's, it's, I'm not a, I'm not an endurance athlete, but it would be a little bit like encouraging somebody to do a triathlon or an ultra marathon. Right.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Like, uh, yeah. Why don't you go out there and run 120 miles in the heat? Right. Like. no, like, that's bad. No, most people should not do that. But the people driven to do that should do that. And by the way, the people driven to do that will do that, right? For, you know, for their own reasons. And so it, it really is like that. And yeah, and then look, it's tremendously painful.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You know, most, most of the experience of being in business in a competitive, you know, setting and a startup is sort of the peak version of that is most of it consists of basically being told no, you know, by everybody, you know, you need all these things, right? You need employees. And,
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
you need, you know, financing and you need customers and, you know, you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no. Or, you know, half the time they don't even respond. You know, they just go dark on you and ghost you.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then, you know, just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts, like, you know, punching you square in the face. And, you know, the minute you think your product's working, there's a problem in it. You have to do a recall. And every, you know, it's just, yeah, it's just this constant, it's just kind of this constant rolling, you know, horror story.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So it really depends. One of the things, I think there are certain fields in which you really get to see somebody's core personality and you get to see their kind of core attributes and their core virtues and their core vices and their core weaknesses. And it's really only people under situations of extreme stress where you really see that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so, so part of it is like, we see that we see, we see people when they're at their most stressed and when they're, when they're at their worst. And then, you know, then there are, you know, I would say many cases where we're, you know, one of their only remaining allies, you know, kind of at that point. So that, that's a not uncommon thing.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And, you know, there, there is, you know, sort of a, there's a coaching component to it and a therapeutic and a, just a general, you know, kind of being a friend, you know, being an ally component to it. But I also say the other thing you see is just like, you know, there are very specific personality types of,
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And, you know, there are certain people where, I'll just give you an example, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, a great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has that probably is not well understood enough, which is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations. He is able to maintain an analytical frame of mind.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
even when other people would be, you know, literally bursting into tears and hiding under the table. And I've seen that many, many times. It's just like, you know, the company's been through a tremendous amount of both good and bad, you know, things over the last, you know, I've been involved almost for 20 years. And, you know, we've been through almost everything good and bad.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And I've literally not once seen him raise his voice. You know, he's always been, you know, and he's very sympathetic and he's very, you know, when somebody has a personal crisis, you know, it's not that he's not emotional, like he engages emotionally with people and he's very supportive of people when they have issues. And he, you know, he feels things very deeply like everybody does.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But, you know, he just, he has a level of emotional self-control. You know, psychologists would say, you know, 0% neuroticism. Um, he just doesn't respond emotionally. And as a consequence, he can keep his head right when, when everybody around him is losing theirs. And so you've got that. Having said that, we also work with a lot of people who are, let's say, higher in neuroticism.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Um, and in particular, often the more creative, you know, people who are super creative are often high in neuroticism. And so sometimes you get the, you know, we get the artist type. where they're like incredibly creative and they're a fountain of new ideas and they just are, have a much more, let's say direct engagement with their emotions.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Um, and they feel things, you know, I would say more directly or kind of in a more raw way. And so, you know, when things go bad, it really comes, it really comes down to them emotionally. Um, I was frankly myself probably more on, more on that, on, on, on that side of things. Um, and so, yeah, there, there's, you know, a therapeutic aspect of that. Um,
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The good news, I would say, is generally in business. So a couple of things. So one is it's not in our world. It's not a 90% failure rate. It's about 50%. And 50% is still high, but you have a reasonably good shot. And then I think most problems in business are fixable as long as you can keep the team together.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I think usually when companies crack and go down, it's usually not... Sometimes it's catalyzed by something that happened from the outside. But generally, the thing that actually happens before a company goes down is the team cracks. The team itself cracks internally. And the founders turn on each other or the management team dissolves.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so a big part of it is just with these things is just like... can you keep the team together? If you can keep the team together and, you know, we're happy to be a part of it, you know, we're thrilled, you know, our job is to be part of that team. Then, you know, most of these companies can battle through most things.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so, and so I've said, I've said, I've seen like, I've seen, you know, just as many like incredible last minute saves and rescues and turnarounds as I have, you know, screaming disasters. So, you know, there, there is reason for optimism going into even the dark times.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so it's, you know, it's actually an interesting question. I actually, it's hard to say from the outside. The other thing is you have this, I would say, very interesting thing. You don't have a, you know, there's no homogenous, you know, the government employs whatever it is, you know, millions of people, multiple millions of people. It's not, you know, it's far from a homogenous group.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And I'll just give you some examples. There's a pretty large contingent, which is sort of the baby boom component of it, you know, because the government went on a massive hiring boom in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. there's a pretty big contingent that's close to retirement. And, you know, it was probably going to retire anyway in the near future.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. And you may know this either or either because of age or nationality. You might not know this, but, you know, this this happened before, actually, in my in my lifetime.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so, you know, there's some prospect maybe there for, you know, kind of, let's say, mutually agreeable accelerated retirement, you know, is one possible solution.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
No, no, this happens. So in fairness, this happens at companies. And I'm not saying the Doge is going to do this. I'm not in charge of this, but I'll just give you the scenario that happens in companies. It's something called buyouts. It's contrasted to layoffs.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And it sounds like it's a clever way to do the same thing, but it's actually different, which is you basically, you offer retirement packages. And you let people voluntarily sign up for the retirement. And they don't have to sign up for it. It's a voluntary thing. But if they choose to, they can get accelerated retirement or an unusual level of retirement compensation.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
A way to think about this is the budget crisis that a business has when it gets in trouble or that the government has where we're $36 trillion in debt. The budget crisis is not like the money that we might have to pay to have people retire this year. You can afford almost anything to do that.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It's the savings that you can have compounded over the next 20 years if you get your fiscal house in order. And so you can sometimes do things in the near term that cost more money in order to get the long-term savings, and that often makes sense. And again, I'm not speaking for the Doge, so this is one option. Another option that they've already talked about in public is the remote work thing.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Most federal workers are not actually at work. Most federal workplaces are empty today. There are agencies where there are formal collective bargaining agreements where the employees are down to a day a month in the office. And there's a huge controversy around remote work, is how effective it is, and there are companies that make it work.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So, you know, sort of the late 60s, the 1970s were in many ways, you know, a lot like what we just went through in the last decade, you know, and sort of, you know, Trump is that was that, you know, the version of Trump at that time was Nixon. And, you know, the version of things like, you know, the Iraq War was the Vietnam War and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But if hypothetically you have a government agency with 10,000 people and nobody's literally coming to work, you might, as a taxpayer, have some questions about about exactly what's going on. And then you have this situation where, as they've said, people have to come back to work. Part of the thing of working for the government, working for taxpayers, is people have to come to work.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Well, there are people who have literally left. There are people who have moved to lower-cost locations who are not going to come back to work. And so that's another opportunity. And so there's a lot of this. And then I would say the third thing that they've talked about, which is, I think, probably the part of it that is not well appreciated, is that
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The government that we live under today, you know, remember that old, I don't know if you were, you probably didn't see this because you weren't maybe here at the time, but there's this cartoon that every American kid of a certain age saw in elementary school, social studies, which was how a bill becomes a law.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It's this very bouncy, it's this very bouncy, like 1970s cartoon about the bill and, you know, the Congress, you know, so the White House proposes the bill and then the Congress agrees and then the Senate and then they reconcile and, you know, the bills, it's a little cartoon, you know, bill wrapped in a little ribbon and it bounces up the thing and the president signs it and everybody's happy.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Right. And so it's like, you know, legislation. Right. The legislative process. Most of what the government does and most of the rules that we all live under are not that. Right. Most of that. Most of it's not legislation. Most of it is what's called regulation. Right. Which is very different.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And most of the rules that the government sort of exists in order to process and enforce are regulatory, not not not legislative rules. The government we live under today is the result of basically 60 to 80 years of agencies effectively putting out regulations entirely on their own.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So executive branch agencies just basically deciding that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of rules that we need to live under and then deciding that they need to staff themselves to be able to process and handle and enforce all those rules.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The Supreme Court recently ruled in a series of judgments a couple of years ago, ruled that regulations that were not authorized by legislation are not constitutional. Right. And by the way, if you just read the U.S. Constitution, which is quite short and to the point, it makes it very clear that the legislature, the Congress exists to pass laws. The executive branch exists to enforce those laws.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The executive branch does not get to issue its own laws. Right. And so we've lived in a system where the executive branch has been issuing its own laws for a very long time. The Supreme Court now says that all of those laws regulations are now not constitutional.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so basically any activity in the government that relates to the staffing and enforcement and all of the processes and all the work around those regulations is no longer constitutional. And so there's a lot of government activity that actually is no longer constitutional. And the previous administration was completely uninterested in
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so, you know, energy crises, inflation, all these, you know, hostages crisis, all these crazy comparisons. And basically, and what happened actually was, you know, Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 and the Democrats didn't win another national election until 1992. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
doing anything, bringing the executive branch into alignment with what the Supreme Court had ruled. But again, if you read the Constitution, the Supreme Court gets to make these decisions. They've decided this is not constitutional. This new administration has an opportunity to bring the government more in compliance with the Supreme Court, which means the government will get smaller.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I would start by saying I'm optimistic. Like, I think he's determined. I think that Elon's determined. I think Vivek is determined. I think that, you know, the team around the Doge. By the way, a lot of the key staffing positions, you know, there's a lot of controversy in the press, as usual, about the cabinet officials.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And I think, you know, many of those are also very good. But a lot of the operational managers that are being brought in at, like, the deputy secretary level and the department heads are very, very strong people. And so, you know, I think this is going to be one of the strongest, if not strongest, you know, execution competence capability administrations that we've had in a long time.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Again, maybe arguably since the, I think a reasonable case that this will be the best staffed administration since the 1930s. And so, you know, I'm reasonably optimistic. And then look, the president has this, you know, is in this sort of very interesting position where he doesn't ever have to run again, right? Because he can't. Right.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so like a lot of what happens in the second term, if presidents choose to take advantage of it, is they can do things that caught, you know, that basically might even put their reelection at peril.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
They can do more forceful things because they, you know, they can do the things that they actually think are important as compared to the things that they think they might need to do to get reelected. And that's something you can only do when you're going to get when you're going to get termed out. And so and then, of course, there's just yeah, there's.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Sort of, you know, all the things kind of behind Trump's level of determination this time, which I think is very high. So, you know, I'm quite optimistic. I don't know. I mean, you know, you could paint various cynical pictures of the whole thing being gummed up. My guess is if it disappoints, it's going to disappoint in the sense of some of these things are going to get done, but not all of them.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And frankly, I think it'd be great to solve all of our problems at once. But if we can't do that, if we can just basically, if this team can sort of give us a roadmap on how to do things properly and can kind of show us through examples. Let's say there's a thousand versions of this problem that have to get solved and this team only gets to the first hundred.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
then we will have the recipe book for how to solve the next 900 over the next two or three or four administrations that follows that. And so that would be my optimistic failure case. And I think we will get at least that, if not a much more sweeping transformation.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
um it took actually 12 years uh for the democrat party to get back on track and really what had to happen was the party the party and the movement behind it had to go back to the center and to your point had to become a party of actual inclusivity of actual inclusivity of actual tolerance you know it is sort of the democratic party had to reconstruct its own big tent uh precisely for the reason you said which is you you have to be able to attract people back like you have to get people to be able to come back and feel like they're part of a broad-based coalition and not just part of a very a very narrow thing now
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so first of all, I don't know. I just read the announcement. I haven't been face-to-face with the technology, so I don't know anything that's not public on that. Quantum computing historically has been one of those things that is theoretically very exciting and then just extremely hard to actually get working. Quantum computers don't act like regular computers in any way.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And there's always this kind of thing where you, in theory, can kind of demonstrate something in a lab and that maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. it's often not completely clear even whether it worked. And then, you know, could you ever get that to repeat? Could you get that to repeat across, you know, 10 or a hundred different, you know, kind of locations?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Could you ever then apply that to these different problems? Like there, there's just all these like really, really fundamental questions. And so it's one of these really enticing things that, you know, everybody's hoping that we get to. I just, I'm not close enough to know whether they got to the full breakthrough or not.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The thing that I think would be the full breakthrough would be not only does it work in one lab, this is something where, You could now stamp out 10 and then 100 and then 1,000 of these machines, and then you could do it repeatedly.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The most enticing thing of what they said, which is one of these things where you think about it and then you decide you have to stop thinking about it because you'll never think about anything else again, is that in theory, the lab demonstration that they have is doing a computation that the entire universe that we live in, if it was converted entirely to just a giant computer,
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
We are on a very, very different new timeline. So, yeah. So, you know, I think the timeline split twice. It split once in the second week of July. And then it split again on November 6th. And I don't know. You tell me. I mean, can you feel it?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
if every atom in our universe was turned into a giant computer, that computer could not solve that problem before the universe ultimately dies of heat death. Right? And the implication of that is that the computation, therefore, must be spread out across many other parallel universes, which is therefore proof that there are many other parallel universes.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Right. In other words, if you weren't able to spread this computation out across many parallel universes, it could not have been done. Therefore, there must be many parallel universes. Therefore, we do actually live in a multiverse. And there are actually billions or uncountable numbers of parallel realities included.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
yes yes and we're yeah we basically have outs yeah we're yeah we're outsourcing to these other universes i mean you know by the way are we having any impact on them when we do that i don't know um yeah there's some there's some very glitchy 360p universe out there god damn it that guy from google yeah that guy from google's trying to work out if two plus two equals four again Yes, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then, of course, are any of these other universes going to do it to us? So, you know, the quantum people really do believe it's a, you know, we live in many, many, many, many different realities. So, you know, this may be one of those things from science fiction that we end up figuring out.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But, yeah, this is the kind of thing, you know, it's, you know, Einstein's famous reaction to quantum physics was, you know, this is impossible because the famous quote was God doesn't play dice with the universe whatsoever.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. So, so this is, yeah, this is video. So this is a text to video generation. So you put in a text prompt, you get, you get out a video, which sounds easy, turns out to be very hard. It's very magical. They're, they're, Sora's, you know, one of the more impressive ones at OpenAI.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There, you know, we, we, there are others, you know, we have, we have a bunch of others and there's a bunch of others underway. It's a competitive space, but you know, the, the, the class of technologies is very impressive and Sora is very impressive.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
i mean one is just like how amazing is it to live in a world in which you can literally you know say a text prompt of you know i you know a hobbit living in a hobbit town with you know the dragon shows up and then like literally it will render that for you right and if you want the dragon to be rendered out of used car parts you just say dragon made out of used car parts and it renders that for you right and so it's it's like i mean that that's just amazing to start with um uh the even more amazing thing about that
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And opening, I put out a paper about this. It's very interesting. So the amazing thing about that is to generate video that passes the sniff test of the human eye looks at it and thinks that it's real. You can't just sort of copy from other videos. And that's part of what's happening is this is your training. The system I saw is trained on millions of hours of video.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
you know, from like all over the world and all this open source stuff and everything and old, you know, out of old movies and all this stuff. And, you know, then there's copyright disputes over what else is in there and so forth. But, you know, so it's trained on lots of video, but it's not sufficient to just train on lots of, you know, because video is all 2D.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
At that time, it took 12 years, right? So, you know, they lost in 80, they lost in 84, they lost in 88. And then Bill Clinton and then a guy named Al Fromm, who ran this thing called the Democratic Leadership Council. And then Al Gore, you know, kind of put together this program to kind of bring the Democrats back to center. And then that led to, you know, a boom.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It's not sufficient to just train on 2D video and then generate a new 2D video that actually looks to the human eye like it's a representation of the real 3D world. And if you look at these videos coming out from Sora, if you look at them carefully, basically what you see is like multiple sources of lighting in different parts in 3D space coming together.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You see reflections coming off of reflective surfaces that are actually correct. You see translucency coming that's correct. And then you get combinations of these factors. So like, for example, if you do something where like man walking through a puddle at night, you'll get the splashing effects of the water. The water has to splash in a way that is physically realistic.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The light has to come through, refract through the water droplets in the correct way. The water droplets have to reflect the image of the man's shoe in the right way. So, and the AI term for this is world model. This is not only a model for video, this is a model that actually understands the real world. It's a model that actually understands 3D reality, right? And it understands light, right?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And it understands surfaces and textures and materials and motion. And gravity.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And gravity and gravity and shapes. And right. Exactly. All these things. Right. Exactly. You know, a stiff surface versus a spongy surface. Yeah. You know, definitely, you know, give me a close up. Give me a close up of a of a baseball bat hitting a baseball. You know, like in slow motion, it has to deform the baseball in the way that in the real world it does, you know, when it hits the bat.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And like for this story, it has to do all those things. And in fact, it is able to do all those things. Like if you just look at the results, you can see all that's happening. And so. So what that means, backing up to that, the implication is that model is not just a video model. It's what's called a world model, meaning it actually understands 3D physical reality.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The implication of that is that we may have basically just solved the fundamental challenge of robotics. The fundamental challenge of robotics is how do you get a physical robot to navigate the real world without screwing everything up? Right. So how do you get a robot waiter to come navigate through a busy restaurant without stepping on anybody's foot? Right.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Without tripping over anything, without spilling water on the table to understand everything that's happening in real time to be able to adapt? You know, very similar to the self-driving car challenge. Like, how do you do that? But how do you do that for basically everything? And how do you put machines up close with people in such a way that it's like completely safe?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And it turns out one of the things you need to do to do that is you need a world model. The robot needs to have a comprehensive understanding of physical reality so that it can understand what's happening. And so when things change, because the robot's seeing primarily visual, right? It's just like you're seeing visual.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
uh you know for the democratic party with a much more you say sensible centrist you know set of policies and a much much more you know kind of a say open-minded and optimistic attitude by the way pro-business pro pro pro patriotism you know kind of pro you know kind of treating everybody well um and so i you know i'm i am cautiously optimistic that the current democratic party will be able to find its way back in less than 12 years um
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
What do you think?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So I think actually I've detected something interesting and maybe it's just my world or maybe business, but I think it's broader, which is, I actually think a fairly large number of people who didn't vote for Trump are actually feeling, people who run organizations who did not vote for Trump are feeling liberated.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so I'll just start by saying it's really hard to forecast this. And I'll give you my favorite example of this, which was the world's leading AI researchers in the year 1956 got together and they got a grant from the government to spend 10 weeks in the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth University. And so they all got together.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And in that 10 weeks, they were going to finally get to artificial general intelligence. They were so close. It was called AGI. They were almost to an AI that can do everything that a person can do. They were only 10 weeks away. And you'll notice that was in 1956. It didn't happen. We're sitting here in 2024, and we still don't have it. So this field is prone to...
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
This field, of all the fields in tech, AI is prone to utopianism. It's prone to apocalyptic nightmare scenarios. And it's prone to a very, very, it's been very hard to forecast progress, like extremely difficult to forecast progress. Well, another great example of that is OpenAI was not formed to make ChatGPT. OpenAI was not created to make large language models.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
OpenAI was created to make an entirely different kind of AI. And then it turns out if you trace back the origin of GPT, there was a little one guy at OpenAI, his name Alec Bradford. And he was like sitting in a corner and he's like, I think all this other stuff is wrong. I think we should be doing this other thing instead.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so like, you know, even that company that brought us, you know, ChatGPT, you know, didn't, you know, a few years ago, didn't know that that's what they were going to do. So forecasting is very hard, especially about the future.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
um look having said that the progress is staggering uh and and and you know one is just the observed progress is staggering the the plans that people have are incredibly exciting um you know one of the things you always wonder with any field like this is just how much how many more ideas are there right like like arguably we've run out of ideas for what the smartphone can do like you know what's new with the smartphone now versus last year versus the year before it's we've you know the smartphone companies kind of run out of ideas with ai there's ideas all over the place and so that's very optimistic and then
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
many of the smartest people in the world are being drawn into the field. Right. And so every smart college kid, you know, who's considering what to do, a lot of the very smartest are going into the field. And then a lot of people are like coming over from other fields like physics to work on this. Now that it's really started to work. So we're also getting this effect.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It's kind of this, you know, reverse brain drain or something where we're pulling in all the smart people. That's another reason for optimism. And then obviously the commercial opportunity is very large. So that's another reason for optimism. I think, The big focus right now is to get these things to what's called reasoning, general purpose reasoning.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So to get them to predictably be able to solve problems in a way that is fully coherent and leads to good results every time. And these things are very good at solving certain problems most of the time. It's a very unusual technology where if you ask a large language model the same question twice, it actually gives you different answers.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And if it doesn't know the answer to the question, it will sometimes make up an answer. And it is pretty amazing and wild that we have creative computers that will literally make things up. But we need versions of these that don't do that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
We need versions of these that are able to reason their way through complicated logic chains that are able to model physical reality, like I just described, that are able to think longer and get better results. And so there's tremendous amounts of work happening on that right now. I'm pretty optimistic on that. I think by...
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, I think by, I don't know, 2028 or something, I'm just off the top of my head, just with a little bit of margin of safety by 2028, these systems, you'll be able to basically give these systems problems and they'll solve the problems. If it's something that a human being can do, they'll be able to do it. And then robotics is basically that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And I think that would be good for the country, right? I mean, I think even if you're a Republican, you should want there to be a healthy, vibrant, viable, centrist, sensible, responsible, you know, kind of even, you know, kind of stable, you know, configuration of an opposition party, as opposed to, you know, as opposed to what we've seen recently.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then we now have the interface method for robotics because we have large language models so we can now make robots talk and listen and we have voices and human English comprehension and all that stuff. And then basically the rest of robotics is basically mechanical engineering and then some power, basically battery technology. And I think robotics are getting quite close now.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And I bring that up because AI is going to be important if it's just disembodied software, but it's going to be really important if it's around us all the time in the form of actual physical objects. If it exists, yes, in the real world. That's right, in the real world. Yeah. And then, of course, that's already happening, right?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Autonomous, drones now fly themselves, cars now drive themselves, right? So for people who haven't tried either the Waymo cars in places like San Francisco or the new Tesla, the latest version of the Tesla software, they're both outstanding. And so cars now drive themselves. That's a big step forward. Drones now fly themselves.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There are now companies making autonomous submarines and all kinds of fancy things.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Probably. There's, yeah, we have a company that has a military submarine that is, it's literally, it's an unpressurized shell sort of platform. And you can basically customize it in many different ways, load many kinds of things on it. But it's like unpressurized form. It's able to, you know, go far deeper than, you know, than a sub that needs to support human beings can go.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You know, it's able to go down and, you know, be able to do all kinds of things. So, yeah, like, you know, the whole, as we're seeing, you know, On the military side, there's a transformation of military strategy that's underway right now, kind of as these technologies hit that we're already seeing in Ukraine. So that's going to matter.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But look, a lot of this stuff is just going to be stuff in our personal lives and our daily lives.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so to start with, cars today are a disaster from a safety standpoint, right? And so cars, the current run rate of road deaths worldwide is at least a million people a year. Right. And so it's about 40,000 road deaths a year in the U.S. and about a million worldwide. And by the way, that million may be a low number. It may be much higher worldwide. And we just don't know how to count it.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But it's at least a million worldwide. And so, you know, it's sort of like, again, you kind of think about this like, OK, a million people a year dying from cars. OK, over the course of a decade, that's 10 million people. When 10 million people die from something in the modern world, we use words for it like apocalypse, genocide. This is like mass death at a very large scale.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so one is just like, to your point, there's a psychological thing here, which is we have gotten – and by the way, for every death, there's many injuries, right? Many people crippled and never recover. And so there's a psychological thing here, which is we have gotten used to a very large amount of carnage in return for the convenience of modern transportation and logistics.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so I'm cautiously, you know, there's a Democratic Party, there's a civil war already, you know, kind of playing out the Democratic Party. And, you know, there's all these different arguments going back and forth already. And I'm But you're starting to see voices like Richie Torres and Ro Khanna and others who are standing up saying, it's kind of time to go back to the center.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
By the way, you know, in the fullness of time as a civilization, it seems to have been a good trade off. You know, I don't think, you know, very few of us not named Greta Thunberg want to go back to, you know, you know, you know, walking everywhere. Right. Um, and so, um, and you know, you know, you could, you could never go back to riding horses. Right. Cause of course, you know, animal rights.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Um, but, um, you know, so like that, it is amazing that we got there by the way, implication of that being, if the car were invented today, I mean, imagine the conversation that we would have right about the rollout of the automobile, um, Which is like, okay, the plan is to strap people into 6,000 pounds of steel and glass.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then the plan is to shoot them down a road that may or may not be in good shape at 60 miles an hour. And then they're going to shoot them at each other. And then we're going to have the safety measure. The safety measure is going to be we're going to paint a line down the center of the road. And that's going to keep them from crashing, right?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so there's no way that you'd be able to invent this today or launch this today. So maybe it's good that it happened in an earlier era. So anyway, to your point, we're used to that. The self-driving, both Waymos and Teslas today are far safer than that. far safer.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And there's like edge questions about, you know, like, you know, this is the, the metric is like, you know, collisions per, you know, thousand or a hundred thousand miles or something, or desperate a hundred thousand miles. And like, it was just no question. They're just like tiny percentages relative.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And it's by the way, not that they're necessarily zero, but they're tiny percentages of what we, of what we experienced every day with, um,
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
uh you know with road deaths by the way i think as humans we have a bad intuition on this because we can't see the other drivers most of the time when we're driving um so i find the cure for people who need to think about this harder is to just go spend a day sitting at the dmv and just watch the parade of humanity
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And watch the people who have to be physically steered by their relatives in front of the camera to get the new driver's license at age 90. And then get an x-ray machine into cars that are driving past you to see how many people are just texting. Or how many people have been hitting the vape for the last three hours. So there's no question that the technology we have is much safer.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There's a societal question as to where we want the trade-off to be. Right. Do we want the tradeoff to be to stay to the current level of carnage because we're used to it? Right. Or do we want, you know, and wait until the computers are perfect or, you know, is it just is it enough for the computers to be much better, which is what's actually happening?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Interestingly and optimistically, we as a society have chosen to actually accept we have we have chosen to roll out self-driving without the computers being perfect. And so, you know, there's Teslas and Waymos on the road all over the place. And, you know, and people are fine with it. And I actually think that's like, it's a very optimistic thing that we were able to do that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And again, I'm cautiously optimistic that that will happen.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
If you talk to the people who make self-driving cars, what they tell you is the problem is not ever a self-driving car colliding with a self-driving car. The problem is it's when you have other humans in the mix. Right. As you'd expect. Right. Because humans react in unpredictable ways. And so a lot of the engineering going into these cars is to accommodate the human drivers.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There will be some future state years in the future where there are no more human drivers, at least on public roads. And when that happens, these things will be like basically completely safe because then you won't have the human element in there. And so one of the things that we may want to drive, you know, we have to drive to ultimately is that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There are a lot of questions around that, but that may be where we want to go to. I'm pretty optimistic about this. I think that these companies are making excellent progress. I think that the, this says pros and cons, but the Chinese auto industry is now coming online. And I think they're also going to be quite good at this. And I think they're coming now.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so I think that this whole space is going to develop, I think, quite quickly.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So it's really big. So it's really quite something. So a couple of things. So one is there was just a political story that was really good that talked about the first big kind of summit meeting that the Democrats have had, which was the DNC hosted a meeting of the state Democratic Party leaders. And and and it started with a full land acknowledgement. Right. And then the right, which is step one.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. So the term most common in our world is they call it eVTOL, E-V-T-O-L. So electric vertical takeoff and landing. Okay. Right. So VTOL, everybody's seen VTOL, V-T-O-L, vertical takeoff and landing. It's a Harrier jet. the military flies. The movie True Lies, the big scene on the Harrier jet.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So it's the jet that has thrusters that point down, it rises, and then it has thrusters that carry it forward. And so we've had these VTOL things. And by the way, we also have had helicopters, which have the same property. So we've had these things in the past. And then the electric part is basically that they'll be electric.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then the other presumptive part of that is that they'll be autonomous. They'll be self-piloting. You know, because for those things to go mass market, you can't expect everybody to get a pilot's license, right? You're going to want to just get in one and sit back and let the thing fly itself. So autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing. We have all of the elements to do that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
We know how to do all of that. Like all those technologies exist now. And there are companies that have put this together and have these products working. Um, the big issue right now, um, I, I think there's a couple of big issues. One is just, is power, um, which is, it's just, it takes a lot of power to get something in the air and keep it in the air.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Um, and like I said, batteries aren't very good right now, um, relative to what we need for things like that. Um, so, you know, we need, we need some breakthroughs in batteries and then the other is just, you know, cost and, and, and, and, you know, infrastructure and, and then, you know, safety regulate, you know, sort of safety regime and all that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Over the course of five or ten years, I think you could imagine that happening. There are people working on the Iron Man suit. Elon keeps making references to it. I don't know that he's working on it or not, but he keeps making references to it. I don't remember.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
One of the old James Bond movies, like Goldfinger, one of those movies, actually had what looked like a stunt where James Bond actually escaped from a house by strapping on a jetpack. Um, and actually, and actually did this thing and he did this thing, a big arc up in the air. And then he landed, you know, like a half mile away. And when I was a kid, I watched it like, you know, I just love those.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I love those movies. And I watched it. I was like, well, clearly they did that with like a green screen special effects. And it's like, no, that was an actual jet pack. No way. That actually, yes, that actually existed. And actually the military has those today.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, that's right. So today that would be jet-powered, and there are jet packs like that. Again, expensive, risky, not mainstream.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yes, exactly. That's maybe the second most dangerous hobby after flying in squirrel suits. So those are the hobby videos where they end, the YouTube videos end two seconds before the final moment. But look, we know how to get things in the air. We know how to do that. And so is there a kind of propulsion? Is there a kind of either fuel system, propulsion system? Is there a battery system?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
By the way, there are hobbyists that have literally put together quadcopter drones It's like a helicopter using lots of individual quadcopter rotors. And so that could be electric powered and could basically do the same thing. And so there's lots of hobbyist activity here. And so I think people are going to be working on this a lot over the next few years. Solving autonomy helps tremendously.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
because you're able to, you know, then the human doesn't need to be trained. You can, you can make the thing super safe. Another interesting thing that's happened is if you've seen the Waymo car, like the Waymo cars in the street, they've got this sensor on the top of the car that kind of spins around and And that's a system called LiDAR. And it's a light-based form of radar.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then the current chairman of the party gave the stem-winding speech about how the party absolutely needs to double down on identity politics. Step two, and then this horrific tragedy in New York with this CEO getting shot and killed. There's now loud, prominent voices on the left, including in the press, saying basically, yay, murder. which I think is, you know, step three is maybe not.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so it's a system that lets it do basically 3D mapping of the environment. So the Tesla is basically optical. So the Tesla is using cameras to construct a 3D model of the environment and sort of interpolating distances based on having different camera angles. The Waymo cars actually have these sensors called LiDAR that actually do depth sensing sensors.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The problem with the depth sensing is LiDAR sensors historically have been extremely expensive, which makes it hard to field these things and products. But they're coming down rapidly in price now. And about three months ago, I bought my nine-year-old as my prototype, in-house prototyper for all this stuff. And I got him a Chinese robot dog for, I think, $1,600. And the robot dog's snout is...
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And it's a robot dog like the demos you've seen. If you've seen the Buster Dynamics robot dogs, it's like that, but you can buy it and you can actually have one of your own. It does all the things. It's very impressive. And it actually has the snout that's the spinning sensor. And so they've somehow gotten LiDAR down to a couple hundred dollars.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And again, like, that's very encouraging, because now that you've got that now you could start to think about building all kinds of things that then have have depth sensing. And so all that, yeah, so all these pieces are starting to fall into place.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And with a little bit of luck and some progress and batteries, the next, you know, five years, 10 years, yeah, more of the Iron Man stuff, you know, Justin stuff, hopefully will start to happen.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so I'd say there's like three kind of worlds of speech right now, three zones in the world. There's like the Chinese version, which is we're going to tell you explicitly what the rules are and you better not break them. But basically, you know, other than the things we tell you not to talk about, which we're very clear about, you know, you can go crazy and talk about whatever you want.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So kind of the top-down authoritarian kind of model. We have the American model, which is we have free speech constitutionally guaranteed, but there are a thousand unwritten rules of society, like the world's worst version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where there's a thousand different ways to trip the PC police. And if you trip any one of them, you are... your life gets vaporized.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so you might call that kind of bottoms-up authoritarianism, right? Like, you know, the government's not coming to get you. They're not going to jail you for it. But like, you know, boy, you know, just it's a shame that you got fired and your family now hates you and your friends have all left you and you can never work again, right?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So that's like the distributed bottoms-up authoritarian unwritten version of what China has, right? So top-down, bottoms-up. And then there's Europe, which has decided to do both. Um... For reasons I have to say, I don't fully understand. But at least from an American perspective, if you look at the speech laws in the UK or Canada, they are horrifying.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I would like to think that if those speech laws came to the US, we would have a revolution. They're just completely unacceptable. Of course, you can't send police to somebody's house because they said something wrong on Twitter. Of course, you can't do that. but yet it happens. And then, yeah, you know, the rest of Europe has, you know, they all have variations on that.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You know, obviously Germany has like very, you know, explicit versions of that on a lot of topics and other countries do as well. So, yeah, but then also Europe and the Anglosphere have also the, you know, they have the top-down version of the actual laws, hate speech laws and so forth.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then they, but then they also have the bottoms-up authoritarianism of all the implicit codes, which if you're a, You know, highly educated, you know, Ivy League graduate equivalent, you know, your job is to track those codes as they evolve every day by faithfully reading the New York Times cover to cover every day.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And, you know, but if you don't and you fall out of step or you're a working class person, you say the wrong thing. You know, if you crack your knuckles in the wrong way outside of your truck cab, you get accused of being a white supremacist and you get fired, which is something that actually happened in the U.S., during the 2020 craziness.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So yeah, Europe right now is combining the worst of those worlds. And you may know more about it than I do. They seem hell-bent to just get much, much worse.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Like these are not vectoring in the direction of like, let's just say a successful majority electoral path. But again, like the contrast is clear. Like that is a conceivable path. There are some people who want to go on that path. I mean, I think there are a much larger number of, you know, completely sensible people in the party and interested in the party and interested in rejoining the party.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, so I'll say a couple of things. So a friend of mine in private equity went and worked in – he grew up in Texas and worked in the U.S. and then went over and lived in London and did private equity in Europe for five years. And he came back and I said, you know, what was it like?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And he said, Europe is like – he said in Europe it's like there are like five things that are more important than making money and nobody will tell you what they are.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There are these goals and objectives and they're loosely around ideas of societal fairness and they're loosely around ideas of not having to work very hard and they're loosely around retirement things and social services and they're loosely around diversity and they're loosely around immigration, but they don't seem crisply defined. And so maybe there's a bit of an identity crisis happening there.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There's another thing is a famous line that fascism and communism are always looming over the US and landing in Europe. Um, right. Like the U S always, like, there's always this threat of like the U S is going to go communist in the twenties or it's going to go fascist in the thirties or something.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then what actually happens is, you know, Germany, you know, France actually goes communist and Germany actually goes fascist. Right. Like, so, you know, they're actually still, they're actually still communist parties in Europe. Um, uh, and so maybe Europe is downstream of American culture, um, in a way that is maybe helpful in some ways, but harmful in others. Um,
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
who would like to, you know, who would like to see the exact opposite. So, but yeah, I mean, they are going to, you know, argue this and litigate this, I think, all the way out. I think they, you know, they really feel like they have to, they have to argue this.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Well, it's a little bit, let's say a little bit of a great example that with England is just like, okay, like, you know, in the, in the U S we were all trained from birth, of course, to feel, you know, extremely bad about the fate of indigenous peoples on the North American continent. Um, um, um, you know, Chris pop pop question, who are the indigenous people of England?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
No, no, no. The answer is it's the English. Right. Okay. Okay. Like it's just the English. It's just the English.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The English didn't display it. It's like the Normans, it's like the Saxons, whatever came together. But there was no displacement. It's like the indigenous people of England are just the English. Yet somehow the English feel just as bad about indigenous peoples as we do. The other thing is, as you know, England has no history of African... Anyway, I'm not going to go into that topic.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But yeah, the spectacle of BLM in England is really quite something. It's not historically, it's not very historically grounded, let's say. So yeah, so maybe it's just America, maybe America's both functions and dysfunctions kind of ripple out to the rest of the world in a way that is helpful in some ways and harmful in others.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then maybe it's a, I mean, from the outside, it seems like it's a continent that is in a series of countries that are having just a massive identity crisis. Yeah.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And you mentioned the folks you've talked to, like, you know, there are now some, you know, I think some, you know, some voices, including some, you know, folks that are pretty far left who are kind of saying, all right, let's pause for a moment and make sure we're not going off the cliff.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, look, part of it is some of the great UK entrepreneurs come to the US. And by the way, this is not just true of the UK. It's also true of France and Germany and Sweden and Norway and many other countries, right? And so just because the US has such a highly evolved, advanced entrepreneurial ecosystem, You know, it may just be that we're drawing a lot of them.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
They're feeling like they can make changes that they have been wanting to make for a long time. And they can really dial down a lot of the things that have really been causing the problems.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so they just, you know, they don't start companies in the UK because they've left. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is that, you know, the identity crisis. Here I just know what I hear from my friends who are, you know, English or French or German, which is just, you know, they feel like their home countries and cultures are just not very supportive of the entire concept.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You know, the governments don't necessarily want it. You know, the legal codes are not, you know, well set up for it. You know, look, the UK, you know, you know, there's a great example. So there's a great example of the dichotomy, just like the speech thing. So, you know, in the US, you know, this AI thing is kind of, you know, the big exciting thing in tech and the US is forming it.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And, you know, the Biden administration was threatening to do all these horrible regulatory things. But, you know, the new administration is certainly not. They're going to do, I think, really smart things. And so there's going to be a AI tech boom in the US. It's going to be spectacular. And a lot of that is around startups. Europe, the EU, has chosen to basically make all of that illegal, right?
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so they passed this thing called the EU AI Act, and this guy Thierry Breton has this kind of crowning achievement to basically make AI startups in the EU illegal. So they've just decided they just don't want them.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, well, the EU, you know, the EU, they have this slogan, the EU kind of bureaucrats have this slogan that should say, you know, we're not going to lead the world in innovation, but we can lead it in regulation, right? It's like, no, right, exactly.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And that's what your reaction is the appropriate reaction, which is like, no, that's not actually what we're going to, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. So like, if it's not literally happening, There, then you're not going to be able to regulate.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And in fact, what's happening is new leading edge AI products from American companies now are actually not being are actually not being released in not even being released in Europe, right? So like the new Apple AI products, and I actually think the new open AI products as well are just not even, you know, literally being released in Europe as a result.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The UK, again, has chosen this middle form, which is they sort of made it illegal, right? And so they did this, the last administration did this disastrous AI safety push, which was basically a massive red light, basically saying, don't even bother to try to start AI startups in the UK.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But it wasn't like as overt a ban as the EU put on, but it was like this massive signal that basically says this is not a safe place to do it. And I think the UK is kind of stuck halfway in the middle right now and kind of has to decide which way it wants to go.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Well, the killing itself was obviously an enormous shock, and I know people who knew him and had been with him recently. So he was a well-known figure in the healthcare industry, so very respected in sort of the business circles. So Yeah, I mean, enormous shock.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah. So Dominic has this great, I'm glad you brought it, Dominic. He's a good friend of mine. So Dominic has this great line. He says, the people aren't running the system. The system is running the people. Right.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And he uses that to describe the UK government, but you could also describe the US government and you could also describe the EU kind of the same way, which is like, in a sense, it's like, what happens when you get face-to-face with people in government is what you realize is, you know, there are actually a significant number of like very publicly spirited, very determined people who actually want to do good things.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then there's people who are not like that and they're just there for the job or whatever. But there are people who legitimately are working hard and trying to figure things out. And what happens is, if you know them, what happens generally, they get ground down. They end up disappointed and then they end up either becoming disillusioned or they end up leaving and going into the private sector.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so I think Dominic's explanation is a good one. which is the system is running the people, not the people running the system. The bad news with that is that, you know, it would be easier, like if the solution was just to swap out the people, in a sense, that would be an easy answer to the question.
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#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Whether you could do that or not is an open question, but at least you would know what to do to reform the system as Dominic talks about and others talk about. And I actually saw, actually Starmer's now talking about this too, right? Which is like, okay, how do we actually like redo the system is of course much harder.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarvin, who's also a good friend of mine. And the way he describes the American system that's running the people, the way he describes it is, we are living under FDR's personal monarchy 80 years later without FDR. And the reason he describes that, he says, look, before FDR, the federal government was actually very small.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Tax rates were super low. The federal government didn't do very much. The FDR dramatically, by orders of magnitude, increased the size and scope of the federal government. He did that for two reasons. One was the New Deal, and then the other was World War II.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so the federal government that Franklin Roosevelt left behind in 1945 when he passed away was the government that he had built, which he had run the entire time from 1933 to 1945 himself. in which he had staffed himself and he had overseen himself and everything. And he built this, basically this giant structure.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And as Curtis basically says, as long as you had FDR running that, it could run really well. And we won World War II and saved the free world and pulled the US out of depression, like the whole thing worked and it was great.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But if you let an organization of that size and scope run without its founder CEO for 80 years, you end up with what we have now, which is just like basically an out of control bureaucracy, like an out of control system in which people can't even make positive change even if they want to.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then, of course, you know, at first, you're just like, well, these things are either random or, you know, you know, or most murders are, you know, committed by, you know, you know, somebody in somebody's personal life.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And again, that's why you could have in the US, you could have reason for optimism, which is, okay, what do you need? Well, you need another FDR like figure, but in reverse, right? You need somebody and a team of people around them who's actually willing to come in and like take the thing by the throat and make the changes.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
By the way, make the changes that FDR would probably make if he were here to make them. But he's not, right? And so somebody else has to step up and do that. It has to be a president because nobody else conceivably has the power to do that. But we will see how much this president can do. But that's a lot of what this administration plans to do.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
In the UK, look, the UK government maybe grew up in parallel with the US government. So maybe FDR is also partially responsible for it by inspiring the general modern Western style of governance. But also, of course, the English system grew up for many centuries before that. it may be time for an FDR-style transformational leader to come in and really get a grip on it.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You know, the way this one seems to be unfolding, you know, is then I don't know anything that's not in the press, but it seems to have a, you know, ideological motivation behind it. And And then it's like, okay, is that just a one-off or is this the beginning of a pattern?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Oh, go to X. Go to X. Pmarca, P-M-A-R-C-A on X.com. Heck yeah. And also on Substack.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Good. Fantastic. Thank you, Chris.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And I would say a lot of people I talk to are very disconcerted by, I would say, the enthusiasm that a lot of people in the press are showing. There have been a shockingly large number of stories of the line of, of course, murder is bad. But we shouldn't laugh.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Right. Well, I mean, it is. I mean, you have to laugh or you cry. Right. So and then it's like 3000 words that come after the butt. Right. And it's like, OK, like, you know, which is basically a long, long, long winded sort of justification for murder. And so, you know, that that is that is disconcerting. There are some comedians now, comedians, you know, that have gotten in the game.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so, you know, I would say this is fairly disconcerting. I mean, you know, we'll see what happens. The scary scenario, you know, I mentioned the 70s, you know, domestic terror actually got to be quite a thing in the 70s in the U.S.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And there's this great book called Days of Rage that kind of chronicles basically this like very widespread pattern of domestic terror, ideologically motivated domestic terror in the 70s by, you know, many kind of, you know, sort of radical revolutionary groups, the Weather Underground and many others.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I think it's wider than people anticipated. And I've been in some discussions where people are like, yeah, it really feels like the air is coming out of the... It really feels like the tension is draining out of the system in an interesting way this time, which is, of course, the exact opposite of how it felt in 2016. And so it's... I don't know. I'm cautiously optimistic that actually...
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And, you know, what a lot of those domestic terrorists had in common was sort of this very, you know, various kind of privileged backgrounds. You know, a lot of these were like, you know, Ivy League, you know, like the Weather Underground came out of Columbia University. And then, you know, domestic terrorists coming out of places like UC Berkeley.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then, you know, sort of very privileged, often very privileged backgrounds, very kind of upper, you know, kind of elite upper middle class people. And then, you know, ended up in some cases going on the lam for years, being hunted by the FBI. And there were, you know, there were years in the 1970s when there were thousands of terror bombings a year.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then there was a run of, you know, anti-corporate, you know, basically murder and terrorism in Germany kind of through that period into the 80s with this thing called the Bader-Meinhof Group and so forth. And so, you know, there's always been this kind of violent edge to kind of call it the anti-corporate, anti-business, anti-industrial, you know, kind of.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And by the way, you know, a little bit of that, you know, some of that's on the left, some of that's on the right. You know, there's different, you know, you can squint different ways. You know, Ted Kaczynski was on the right. This guy maybe appears to be a little bit more on the left. And so this pattern has unfolded before.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
I don't know that it's ever been effective at causing any of the change that its proponents seem to want. These violent tactics usually backfire in our societies. But certainly hope that this doesn't become a copycat situation. And I do think it's striking. I mean, I think there are a lot of voices in American public life who are behaving quite irresponsibly right now.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, it's the thing. Well, it's, of course, murder is bad, but, and then in the 3000 words is basically what you said. So the whole healthcare situation is very, it's obviously very complicated and very emotional.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
This can become a very long conversation, but the sort of key fact that all Western countries are trying to kind of grapple with, and this is true of the US, but also Canada and the UK and the rest of Europe, So basically there's two key facts. So key fact number one is healthcare is at like a fifth of U.S. GDP in terms of spending.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
So like a fifth of all national production per year goes to healthcare. And that number is rising. Healthcare is basically rising. And if you just chart this on a graph, it's just very clear what's happening is healthcare left unchecked is going to go from being a fifth of the economy to a fourth to a third to a half. And then someday in the future, effectively all of it.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then nobody wants to pay for it. And so everybody wants somebody else to pay for it. And then just saying the government should pay for it, of course, doesn't answer the question because the government has to be funded by somebody. And so that means taxpayers have to pay for it. And so you get in all these questions.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And of course, we live in a progressive taxation system in which people who make more money pay a higher percentage of taxes. And there's big political fights over that. And I'm kind of neutral on that. I don't really care. It's not one of my issues. But it's part of this big fight over who pays for it. So that's... That's issue number one.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And that's just going to, you know, it's going to bring out a lot of emotion in people because, of course, especially as you get closer to end of life or you get into these, you know, very bad chronic, you know, thing, you know, conditions that require a lot of money to take care of people. It's this real challenge of how to how to pay for it.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
You know, look, I don't think there's any like overnight, you know, transformation and there's going to be continued, you know, drama and strife and so forth.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then the other kind of key kind of fact is all these countries also are aging very rapidly. The demographics are headed in the direction of increased average age and the consequence of that is a sharp reduction in the percentage of working age people versus older people, retirees.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
The whole basis for every social welfare system in the world is that the current workers pay for the current retirees. That is the basis. The Social Security Trust Fund doesn't exist. The money that you pay in, you don't get later. You know, your money you're paying today gets paid out to old people today.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then when you're old, there need to be young workers in the system to be able to generate the money to pay you. And that's true for Social Security. It's true for Medicare. It's true for Medicaid. It's true for all of these kind of – it's true of any socialized health system. It'd be true of government-funded health system. It'd be the same thing. It's just, you know, for taxpayers.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Taxpayers are people who work. Um, and so if the, if the demographics go upside down and you have a country, you know, and you, you can see the future in places like Japan where you just have like way more old people than you have young people. Um, and then you just have this like fundamental mismatch and then you, you literally quite simply can't pay for it.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
But I think a lot of institutions, I think a lot of leaders and a lot of institutions, including ones that are left leaning, I think they've just simply had it with a lot of the chaos of the last 10 years and a lot of the drama and a lot of the pressure and conflict. And I think they're just done with it. And they want their, you know, if it's a company, they wanted to get back to business.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And so these two things kind of put this whole issue in a vice.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Now, what we try to do in our line of work, which is tech and biotech in BC, what we try to do is figure out ways to kind of get out of that vice primarily through new technologies that at least in some cases will provide new kinds of healthcare, new kinds of drugs, and new kinds of medical devices, but also things that are able to break that price curve and able to make healthcare much cheaper.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
That's the other way to solve it is you make all this stuff much cheaper, and that's where You know, we get excited about things like, for example, AI and healthcare, right? And, you know, maybe the prospect that instead of, you know, people having, you know, only having human doctors, maybe a lot of, you know, routine medical interactions are with AI doctors.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And then, you know, you only consult with a human doctor when something gets, you know, really sensitive. And, you know, I think there's a reasonable chance in the next few years that we can figure out how to do that. So hopefully we can solve this with technology. It is weird, I will say, and it's coming out in this kind of current, you know, kind of debate and controversy.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
It is weird that the same people who are the maddest about healthcare costs rising and not being able to pay for it are also the ones who hate technology the most. Right?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
And nuclear and people who care most about climate, the people who care most about climate and carbon emissions hate nuclear energy the most. Right. And it's like, all right, we are genuinely trying to help solve these. Those of us in tech are genuinely trying to help solve these.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Yeah, well, there's – part of it is just like simply, right, moral intuitions, right? And so you have these kind of moral intuitions that – and moral intuitions presumably evolved to be the way they are according to kind of historical conditions of how people lived. But historically, people lived in these very small kind of communities. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
There's this great book called The Ancient City that goes back and reconstructs basically prehistoric civilization, what it was like. Basically, the conclusion of it is go back 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 years and further back. Basically, we all lived in these very small tribes maxed out at a few 100 people.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Then you could describe the politics of the tribe being a hybrid of absolute fascism combined with absolute communism. Right. Like at the same time. Right. So it was like absolute fascism in that the father of the family or the leader of the tribe had the total power of life or death over all the members of the tribe and could kill them at any moment for whatever reason he wanted to.
Morning Wire
Wisconsin’s Judicial Election Decided & HHS Layoffs Begin | 4.2.25
They're going to try to gerrymander Wisconsin to remove two Republican seats. The House is currently Republican by a razor-thin margin, which means that Losing this judge race has a good chance of causing Republicans to lose control of the House. If you lose control of the House, there will be nonstop impeachment hearings and subpoenas.
Morning Wire
Wisconsin’s Judicial Election Decided & HHS Layoffs Begin | 4.2.25
They're going to do everything possible to stop the agenda that the American people voted for.
Morning Wire
Trump-Zelenskyy Talk & UPenn’s Federal Funding Paused | Afternoon Update | 3.19.25
The astronauts were only supposed to be there for eight days, and they've been there for almost 10 months. So obviously that doesn't make any sense. SpaceX could have brought the astronauts back after a few months at most, and we made that offer to the Biden administration. It was rejected for political reasons, and that's just a fact.
Morning Wire
Tariff Time & Marine Le Pen Convicted in France | 4.1.25
If you create a massive financial incentive for people to come to the United States illegally, then that's what they will do. The thing that actually has the Democrats losing their mind is that we're going to turn off the payments to illegals.
Morning Wire
Tariff Time & Marine Le Pen Convicted in France | 4.1.25
They were asleep at the switch. It was a massive, large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent, deep blue, one-party state from which there would be no escape.
Morning Wire
DOGE Probes the Fed & Trump’s Gaza Proposal Fallout | 2.6.25
The more than 8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayer's dime will no longer be happening.
Morning Wire
DOGE Probes the Fed & Trump’s Gaza Proposal Fallout | 2.6.25
We are going line by line when it comes to the federal government's books. And this president and his team are making decisions across the board on do these receipts serve the interests of the American people? Is this a good use of the American taxpayers' money?
Morning Wire
DOGE Probes the Fed & Trump’s Gaza Proposal Fallout | 2.6.25
His goal is lasting peace in the Middle East for all people in the region. We've had the same people pushing the same solutions to this problem for decades. It does not mean American taxpayers will be funding this effort. It means Donald Trump, who is the best dealmaker on the planet, is going to strike a deal with our partners in the region.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
Here with the latest on the budget battle is Daily Wire Deputy Managing Editor Tim Rice. So Tim, Elon issued a pretty harsh critique of this budget bill.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley. It's Thursday, June 5th, and this is Morning Wire.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
Now, there was already a lot of infighting over this. And then yesterday, the CBO numbers dropped. What did they say?
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
So it looks like we should gear up for a big fight as this heads to the Senate in the next few weeks. But this wasn't the only budget legislation moving through Congress, correct?
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
Well, this is going to be a major fault line for the GOP this summer. Tim, thanks for reporting.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
During the Biden administration, the White House put a heavy emphasis on Pride Month. But this year, under Trump, things are looking a lot different.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
The Senate takes up debate on Trump's budget bill, while Musk raises concerns over massive debt.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
And two Chinese nationals have been arrested for smuggling a dangerous pathogen into the United States.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips has more. So Cabot, a potential case of what the FBI is calling agricultural terrorism. What do we know?
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
Now, what do we know about this pathogen that they brought in?
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
Now, this isn't the first arrest of a Chinese academic in the United States, even just recently.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
So this is part of the Trump administration's broader crackdown on Chinese academics.
Morning Wire
Budget Hawks Rejoice & Trump Cancels “Pride Month” | 6.5.25
Well, this has been a sleeper issue for a while. I'm glad it's being addressed. Cabot, thanks for reporting.
Morning Wire
Nashville Mayor Investigated & Europe’s Speech Police | 5.29.25
You know, I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it. And it reminds the work that the Doge team is doing. I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both.
Morning Wire
Tesla Attacks Investigated & Trump Battles Legal Injunctions | 3.20.25
Tesla is a peaceful company. We've never done anything harmful. I've never done anything harmful. I've only done productive things. So there's some kind of mental illness thing going on here because this doesn't make any sense.
Morning Wire
Tesla Attacks Investigated & Trump Battles Legal Injunctions | 3.20.25
They basically want to kill me because I'm stopping their fraud. And they want to hurt Tesla because we're stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government.
Morning Wire
Le Pen Barred from Election & Wyoming’s Strict Voter ID Law | Afternoon Update | 3.31.25
The reason for the checks is that it's really just to get attention. We need to get attention. And it's somewhat inevitably, when I do these things, it causes the legacy media to kind of lose their minds. And then they'll run it on every news channel. It would cost like 10 times more to get the kind of coverage that we get.
Morning Wire
Trump’s WEF Warning & CNN’s Newsroom Shakeup | 1.24.25
I don't trust Sam Altman, and I don't think we want to have the most powerful AI in the world controlled by someone who is not trustworthy.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
In 10 years, probably AI could do anything better than a human can, cognitively. Probably almost, I think in 10 years, based on the current rate of improvement, AI will be smarter than the smartest human. Keep watching. There will also be a massive number of robots.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
It's not meant to look like any prior robot. And we'll iterate the design. A lot of the robot parts are cosmetic. You'll be able to switch out the kind of snap-on cosmetic parts of the robot to make it look like something else if you'd like. So there will be ultimately billions of humanoid robots. All cars will be self-driving. In 10 years?
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
In 10 years, probably 90% of miles driven will be autonomous. Huh. Wow.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
Yeah, like that. In five years, probably 50% of all miles driven will be autonomous.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
Well, goods and services will become close to free. So it's not as though people will be wanting in terms of goods and services.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
Well, you have, I don't know, tens of billions of robots. They will make you anything or provide any service you want for basically next to nothing. It's not that people will have a lower standard of living. They'll have actually a much higher standard of living. But the challenge will be fulfillment. How do you derive fulfillment and meaning in life? Keep watching.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
Watch this. 20% likely. Maybe 10%.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
After 10 years.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Biden Bombshell: Pardons Are VOID & VACANT | PBD Podcast | Ep. 562
Yeah, but you can look at it like the glass is 80, 90% full. Meaning like 80% likely will have extreme prosperity for all.
PBD Podcast
California Wildfires, Gulf of America, Zuckerberg Kills Meta Fact-Checking | PBD Podcast | Ep. 530
Yeah, my workload went up from about, I don't know, 70 to 80 hours a week to probably 120. So...
PBD Podcast
California Wildfires, Gulf of America, Zuckerberg Kills Meta Fact-Checking | PBD Podcast | Ep. 530
Yeah, I go to sleep, I wake up, I work. Go to sleep, wake up, work. Do that 7 days a week. I'll have to do that for a while.
PBD Podcast
California Wildfires, Gulf of America, Zuckerberg Kills Meta Fact-Checking | PBD Podcast | Ep. 530
Watch what he says here. But I think eventually once Twitter is set on the right path, I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla. So...
PBD Podcast
"MK Ultra Was REAL!" - Chase Hughes UNVEILS Disturbing Truth About CIA, PSYOPS, and Mind Control | PBD Podcast | Ep. 531
It's just... I said, tell me the story of your life and the decisions that you made along the way and why you made them. And then... And also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them. And that question I think is very important because the people that really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it. They know the little details.
PBD Podcast
"MK Ultra Was REAL!" - Chase Hughes UNVEILS Disturbing Truth About CIA, PSYOPS, and Mind Control | PBD Podcast | Ep. 531
And the people that pretended to solve the problem, they can maybe go one level and then they get stuck.
PBD Podcast
"MK Ultra Was REAL!" - Chase Hughes UNVEILS Disturbing Truth About CIA, PSYOPS, and Mind Control | PBD Podcast | Ep. 531
That's great.
PBD Podcast
"MK Ultra Was REAL!" - Chase Hughes UNVEILS Disturbing Truth About CIA, PSYOPS, and Mind Control | PBD Podcast | Ep. 531
Take it in.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Share & DOGE & Tell with Mina Kimes, Dan Le Batard, and Pablo Torre
He's starving mothers. There's mothers that can't get food. Totally false. That's all you're hearing. No one's talking in any of these mainstream liberal talk shows. No one is talking about all this fraud and waste.
Pivot
Elon's Ultimatum, Trump's Military Purge, and Amazon's 007 Deal
I am become meme. Yeah, pretty much. I'm just living the meme. It's like there's living the dream and there's living the meme. And it's pretty much what's happening, you know?
Pivot
Trump's Movie Tariffs, Buffett's Retirement, and Elon's New City
I've not harmed anyone in my life. They've also called President Trump a Nazi, but he also is not a violent person. And in fact, has done a lot to prevent wars and stop wars. which is the very opposite of being a Nazi, actually.
Pivot
Elon's First Cabinet Meeting, Trump's Gold Card, and Bezos' WaPo Revamp
We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.
Pivot
Elon's First Cabinet Meeting, Trump's Gold Card, and Bezos' WaPo Revamp
What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?
Pivot
Elon’s Politics Detox, the “Big, Beautiful” Bill's Next Phase, and Open AI's Big Bet
Do you see yourself and are you committed to still being the chief executive of Tesla in five years' time?
Pivot
Elon’s Politics Detox, the “Big, Beautiful” Bill's Next Phase, and Open AI's Big Bet
No doubt about that at all?
Pivot
Elon’s Politics Detox, the “Big, Beautiful” Bill's Next Phase, and Open AI's Big Bet
What happened to the $2 trillion?
Pivot
Elon’s Politics Detox, the “Big, Beautiful” Bill's Next Phase, and Open AI's Big Bet
Well, is it going to happen? Because Doge is supposed to run until next July.
Pivot
Elon’s Politics Detox, the “Big, Beautiful” Bill's Next Phase, and Open AI's Big Bet
No, I'm not at all. I'm just asking, is that still your aim then? Is it still your aim to get to 2 trillion?
Pivot
Elon’s Politics Detox, the “Big, Beautiful” Bill's Next Phase, and Open AI's Big Bet
That's exactly what I'm asking. So is it still your aim to go from 170 billion to 2 trillion?
Pivot
DOGE’s Chaos Strategy, X’s New Valuation, and Guest Co-Host Katie Drummond
Well, the overall goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit. And if the deficit is not brought under control, America will go bankrupt. This is a very important thing for people to understand. A country is no different from an individual in that if an individual overspends, an individual can go bankrupt. And so can a country.
Pivot
DOGE’s Chaos Strategy, X’s New Valuation, and Guest Co-Host Katie Drummond
She's asking, what if Russia breaks the ceasefire?
Pivot
Trump’s Putin Call, Inflation Rises, and Sam Altman Strikes Back at Elon Musk
I mean, these things, it's just common sense. It's not draconian or radical, I think. It's really just saying, let's look at each of these expenditures and say, is this actually in the best interest of the people? And if it is, it's approved. If it's not, we should think about it.
Pivot
Trump’s Putin Call, Inflation Rises, and Sam Altman Strikes Back at Elon Musk
How much of that was real? I don't know.
Pod Save America
Trump's Crackdown on Dissent
What happened to the guy that had become Meme? You don't look very become meme, Elon.
Pod Save America
Trump's Crackdown on Dissent
How was it? It looked really fun. The rally was great.
Pod Save America
Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola. Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.
Pod Save America
Elon Gets DOGE'd
As some people know, there's been some blowback for the time that I've been spending in government with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. But the large slug of work necessary to get the DOGE team in place and working in the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done. Next month,
Pod Save America
Elon Gets DOGE'd
may um my time allocation uh to doge will drop significantly i'll have to continue doing it for i think probably the remainder of the president's term just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back trump was then asked about this in the oval office on wednesday night here's what he said
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Well, I love the president. I just want to be clear about that. I love the president. I think President Trump is a good man.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or... or wrong. I couldn't find anyone smarter, right? We settled on this guy. Well, thanks for having me. I actually am tech support, though.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
This is going to be hard. I feel like I'm interviewing two brothers here.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
What kind of truck would Blade Runner drive? That was the design idea.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
861. Andy & DJ CTI: Appeals Court Clear Way For DOGE To Resume Cuts To USAID, 3rd Trump Term? & El Salvador Accepts More Alleged Tren De Aragua Gang Members From Trump Admin
a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress. I'm trying to connect the dots of how did they become rich while earning, how'd they get 20 million if they're earning 200,000 a year? Nobody can explain that. We're gonna try to figure it out. And certainly stop it from happening.
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
Well, you, you're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit?
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's okay. You're all gone. You're all gone, so every one of you is gone, and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it. But, you know, if you look at our... Well, I'd be happy to help out. By the way, congratulations. I just looked at the number of people that are listening to you and I chat.
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
We'll call it a chat. But congratulations. This is very good. I mean, it's great. And you're an interesting character.
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
That the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement, that's nice. Smart guy. He knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. That's great. Very much appreciated. I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms.
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
We need to do it. Can't go on the way we are now.
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
X, are you okay? This is X. And he's a great guy. High IQ.
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
And we're going to be signing a very important document deal today. It's Doge. And I'm going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things that we found, which are shocking.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2210 - Greta Goes To Gaza!
Look, I just read you what Musk said. He said people should be ashamed to vote for this bill. I agree with him.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Folks, we have a ton to get to on today's show. Marco Rubio tearing up the Senate, the latest on the big, beautiful bill with both the head of the OMB, Russell Vogt, as well as the head of the House Budget Committee. We'll get the latest on those negotiations and Golden Dome coming to America. But first. Our Daily Wire Plus Memorial Day sale is happening right now.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The same exact perspective that wrecked large parts of Europe has been accepted for a very long time by Democrats. Some of the more effective Democrats are now realizing that that's bad policy, but not apparently the Senate Democrats who are questioning Marco Rubio. And then when it came to sort of broader American foreign policy,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The deeper question now is whether he's also abandoning America's three-year-long project to support Ukraine. Mr. Trump told President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine and other European leaders after his call with Putin that Russia and Ukraine would have to find a solution to the war themselves, just days after saying that only he and Putin had the powers to broker a deal.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And he backed away from his own threats to join a European pressure campaign that would include new sanctions on Russia, according to six officials who are familiar with the discussion. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Now, again, it is unclear what it means when President Trump or J.D.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Vance, Vice President, have said that we are going to walk away from negotiations. Does that mean we also walk away from Ukraine in general? Not clear at all. And again, I understand that it's Pepsi over that because we should be clear what the results of Vladimir Putin's intransigence actually are. You can certainly read it as the United States going more isolationist.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
You can also read it as the United States will continue to support Ukraine in the absence of a negotiated end to the war. And again, there are lots of mixed signals here. President Trump recently wrote on Truth Social that the conditions to end the war will be negotiated between the two parties as it only can be because they know details of a negotiation nobody else would be aware of.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
But then he said, Russia wants to do large-scale trade with the United States when its catastrophic bloodbath is over. And I agree. There's a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is unlimited. Now again, He's saying after the war.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So unclear whether that means that if Russia refuses to come to an end of the war, the United States still pursues some sort of economic off-ramp with Russia while curbing its support to Ukraine. Here is where Congress should fill the gap, by the way. Congress should, in fact, fill the gap.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And one of the saddest things that's happened over the course of my lifetime and before is the turning of the legislature of the United States into a vestigial branch of American government. This did not start under President Trump. This was true in large scale under Barack Obama. who after he lost the congressional elections of 2010, suggested that he was going to govern by phone and pen.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And then it was exacerbated under Trump won. And then it was certainly exacerbated under Joe Biden in massive ways, necessitating, by the way, our company literally suing the federal government to stop centralization of power by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to force 80 million people to vax.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And then that has continued until today, where the legislature seems to basically be the sign-off organism for the executive branch, which is never what it was intended to be. When it comes to Russia-Ukraine, the legislature should step in.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Senate Democrats can't seem to get their head around what President Trump is doing on broader foreign policy. And that's because President Trump does not actually have a thoroughgoing doctrine when it comes to his own foreign policy. Everybody keeps trying to forge a philosophy around what President Trump is doing. What is the consistent principle that always holds with regard to President Trump?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And the legislature should say that the United States is committed to, in the absence of any evidence that Putin wants to negotiate, supporting Ukraine sufficient so that Russia doesn't finish off Ukraine. This is the point made by the editorial board over at the Wall Street Journal correctly. Mr. Putin's intransigence has been the status quo for months.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
It is abundantly clear the KGB alumnus will need more pressure to come to the table. The first step would be secondary sanctions on Russian oil. Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton have put together a bipartisan sanctions bill with Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. That measure has north of 70 Senate co-sponsors, a total usually reserved for naming post offices.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
One particular target here would be China, against whom, again, President Trump is very much oriented. China has been feeding Putin's military with machine tools and legacy computer chips. And they've also been buying oil at a discount. Senator Graham said the world needs to understand without China buying cheap Russian oil, Putin's war machine would come to a grinding halt. That is right.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The House would still have to pass the sanctions bill. Obviously, whether there is support in the House for that is largely dependent on what happens with the tax bill. But this is where Congress should make its opinions clear, because Congress is still, last I checked, the major organ of policymaking in the United States, not the executive branch, not the executive branch.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The founders designed this system for a reason. And meanwhile, in foreign policy news that actually is quite excellent, President Trump has now unveiled his plans for the Golden Dome missile defense system. Now, it's funny that people are treating this as some sort of break with American foreign policy. I'm old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was talking about this with regard to Star Wars.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
I was very young, but then it was talked about again with regard to the George W. Bush administration. Ballistic missile defense is a big push under the Bush administration. And now Donald Trump is doing it again. Here he was announcing and explaining what Golden Zone would be.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And the truth is that President Trump's foreign policy is very much ad hoc. It's very situational. That's true of him generally. He makes moves. There's a reaction to the moves. He reacts to the reaction and then he sticks and moves. That is how he operates in the foreign policy realm. It's how he operates in the deal making realm.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
OK, meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he joined that press conference and he explained the Golden Dome is indeed a game changer.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
That, of course, is an excellent development. The reason it's an excellent development, the reason that China is freaking out is because were the United States to be able to successfully complete Golden Dome, what that would essentially mean is that the United States would have a massive systemic advantage against China in any war.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Because in the end, the real threat that China has against the United States is a missile threat. and they are quite far from the United States, if the United States were able to shoot that stuff down, then imagine a situation in which the United States and China went to war over Taiwan. Not completely far-fetched at this point in time. Imagine that that escalated.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Well, China's immediate sort of option to back the United States off would be a threat to hit the American homeland. What if the United States had the capacity to hit the Chinese homeland, but China had no capacity to hit the American homeland? That is the reason why China is freaking out today.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
China put out a statement via its foreign ministry spokesman, Mao Ning, who said that this carries strong offensive implication and heightens the risks of militarization of outer space and an arms race. Mao said the United States in pursuing a U.S. first policy is obsessed with seeking absolute security for itself.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
This violates the principle that the security of all countries should not be compromised and undermines global strategic balance and stability. China is seriously concerned about this. I mean, what they're really concerned about is the fact that they won't be able to make serious offensive moves against other countries without the American deterrent.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And the sort of mutually assured destruction that currently exists between the nuclear-armed countries of China and the United States, that mutually assured destruction goes away the minute the United States can protect itself and China cannot. That is why China is freaking out. This is a good deterrent to stopping China from going after, say, Taiwan.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And Democrats have a very difficult time with that because they would prefer a. consistent but wrong view of the world to an inconsistent and more often right view of the world.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Meanwhile, in other good moves from the military side of the Trump administration, Pete Hegseth has now ordered a review into the disastrous Biden-Afghanistan withdrawal. one of the most colossal epic foreign policy failures of my lifetime, probably the most epic foreign policy failure of my lifetime.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
OK, so again, this is a good thing. It is a necessary thing. Obviously, people should be held responsible for the disaster that was the Afghanistan withdrawal. Electorally, the Biden administration was held responsible, which is why, again, Kamala Harris is not the president of the United States anymore. People forget. And there's a good warning to the Trump administration as well.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Foreign policy disasters that happen on the watch of any president redound to the detriment of that president. Americans don't tend to care too much about foreign policy until disaster arrives. Once disaster arrives, there's only one thing Americans like less than foreign involvement, and that's losing foreign wars. We do not actually like being humiliated.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has become one of the most popular members of the Trump administration, I would say kind of surprisingly, because when he went in, there were a lot of MAGA fans who are not big Marco Rubio fans. They figured that he was too interventionist in his view of foreign policy. Instead, he has retained wide popularity while at the same time
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
It turns out that is a longstanding tradition in America. And again, when we design our foreign policy, that's something that we should absolutely keep in mind. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, you ever wonder what gives elite athletes, business moguls, high performers their edge? Many are turning to Armra Colostrum.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
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The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Whether you're running a company, pushing your limits in training, or simply looking for a natural advantage in your daily life, Armra Colostrum optimizes your body's systems for peak performance and sustained energy. Research has demonstrated that Colostrum does more than just strengthen performance.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
It actually enhances your body's ability to absorb essential nutrients, supports the development of lean muscle mass, and improves endurance. At the same time, it works at the cellular level to accelerate repair and regeneration, helping you bounce back faster after intense physical exertion. Plus,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Armra Colostrum can also support your microbiome and balance and strengthen immune defenses throughout the body. And who doesn't want a stronger immune system, right? We've worked out a special offer for my audience. Receive 15% off your first order. Go to tryarmra.com slash Shapiro or enter Shapiro. Get 15% off your first order. That's T-R-Y-A-R-M-R-A.com slash Shapiro.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Also, tax day may have passed, but for millions of Americans, the real trouble is now just starting. If you missed that April 15th deadline or you still owe back taxes, the IRS is now ramping up enforcement. Every day you wait only makes things worse.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
With over 5,000 new tax liens filed daily and tools like property seizures, bank levies, wage garnishments, the IRS is now applying pressure at levels we have not seen in years. Increased administrative scrutiny means collections are moving fast. The good news, there's still time for Tax Network USA to help. Self-employed or a business owner, even if your books are a mess, they've got it covered.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Get 40% off an annual Daily Wire Plus membership with code DW40. That includes ad-free shows from the most trusted voices in conservative media. You know, me, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and more. You'll also get access to our full entertainment library and the premiere of Dr. Peterson's new series, Parenting, premiering this Sunday exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
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The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
You might have missed April 15th, but you haven't run out of options. Let Tax Network USA help before the IRS makes their next move. You don't want to face the IRS alone. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit TNUSA.com slash Shapiro. That's 1-800-958-1000 or visit TNUSA.com slash Shapiro. Meanwhile, negotiation continues over the so-called big, beautiful bill.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Yesterday, President Trump went to the Hill to try to cudgel various reluctant members of Congress into supporting the so-called big, beautiful bill. Again, this is a version that they're trying to pass in the House.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Then there will be a different version passed in the Senate, and then they will go to reconciliation, where both sides kind of come together to repass a revised version of whatever is the compromise bill. Republicans have been
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
running up against systemic obstacles, including the fact that there are some sort of purple Congress people, you know, Republicans and purple districts who want higher deductions because they are in high tax states like New York or California. That's one wing of the party. Another wing of the party are deficit cutters. They're saying that this bill adds to the deficit.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
echoing many of the central planks of the sort of MAGA hymnal when it comes to foreign policy. So yesterday, he basically just wrecked Democrat after Democrat. It began with one Democrat demanding yes or no answers from Senator Rubio. This would be Senator Jackie Rosen out of Nevada.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
It doesn't cut the deficit enough. President Trump is like, listen, we just got to get it done. Like, don't worry, we have unity. Here was President Trump yesterday.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And I think this was a tremendous session. Again, President Trump's hammer is the thing that is going to get this thing across the finish line. No question. President Trump did, by the way, unleash his hammer against certain members of Congress, including Thomas Massey. Of course, the Republican congressman from Kentucky, Thomas Massey, his basic goal is to vote against pretty much everything.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
I agree with many of his principles when it comes to lowering government spending. It also happens to be the case that voting no on everything isn't actually an electoral strategy. Here's President Trump smashing Massey yesterday.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Again, he is a representative, Massey, of a tax cutting, but also spending cutting wing. And I agree with him on principle. But the problem is you do have to get a majority here. Here is Massey talking about the debt increases. Here's the reality. Massey is right on the issue. There is not the support in the United States for a massive cut to the national deficit or debt. That's just the reality.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Both parties are complicit in this. The only question between the parties when it comes to tax cutting and deficits is which party wants higher taxes and which party wants lower taxes. Both parties seem perfectly willing to run this car directly off a cliff. Here is where Massey is right.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
OK, so again, he's not wrong on principle, but in terms of actually getting a bill across the finish line, Thomas Massey will never allow a bill to get across the finish line if he has anything to say about it, which is why President Trump has been going after him. Similarly, President Trump has been basically telling the sort of left wing Republicans they also need to sit down and shut up.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
He says, listen, we're not trying to destroy Medicare and Medicaid. This is a pretty moderate bill in terms of spending at best. Here's President Trump on Medicare and Medicaid yesterday.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
She tried to scold Marco Rubio about the actions of the Trump administration, suggesting that she was disappointed in him and then suggesting that he needed to answer questions yes or no. How do you square your past views with your present representation of the Trump administration?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Okay, so again, he is making the case basically that we shouldn't really restructure entitlements, but also we should not give away everything to the salt deduction guys in the House. Well, as I've talked about when it comes to bills like this one, the reality is the American people are not ready to do the thing that would actually drive down the national debt. They're just not ready to do it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
I asked our friends and sponsors at Perplexity how much of our national debt is actually driven by Social Security and Medicare as opposed to the kinds of means-tested welfare programs Republicans are trying to change when they talk about putting work requirements on Medicaid, for example. And here's what perplexity tells me.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The national debt is projected to grow significantly over the next decade, driven primarily by mandatory spending programs like Social Security and Medicare. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal debt held by the public is expected to rise from 100% of GDP in 2025 to 118% of GDP by 2035, with annual deficits increasing from $1.9 trillion to $2.7 trillion.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Structural factors like aging demographics, health care costs, growth, and rising interest payments are key contributors. And then it points out that obviously our aging population means that the number of Americans age 65 plus will grow by 47% by 2054. Medicare spending alone is projected to rise by 73% over the next decade alone.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Social Security and Medicare account for nearly 80% of the projected deficit increase between 2023 and 2032. Means-tested welfare programs are a much smaller percentage of the growth of the national debt. Obviously, you do have dedicated taxes that go to pay things like Social Security, but they do not make up for the growth in the cost of Social Security over time.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The Republicans have a very narrow majority here. As I've said a million times, the Big Beautiful Bill is going to be big. It's not going to be quite so beautiful. That's just the way that it is. Mike Lawler, for example, the purple congressman from New York, he's saying that he might continue to oppose the Big Beautiful Tax Bill if he doesn't get his SALT deductions.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
This is the coalition that Mike Johnson somehow has to hold together here.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And the answer, of course, is that Rubio hasn't actually changed many of his past views with regard to the Trump administration. And there is this desire, I think, all sides to claim Trump as their own. And Trump is none of those.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Well, joining us online to discuss the big, beautiful bill is Representative Jody Arrington of Texas. He, of course, is the chairman of the House Budget Committee. Representative Arrington, thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So why don't we first talk about the various competing interests inside the Republican caucus? Obviously, you guys have an incredibly narrow majority in the House. You can only afford to lose a couple of votes and still pass the so-called big, beautiful bill. President Trump stepped by yesterday. He had some criticism for specific wings of the sort of resistance to the big, beautiful bill.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
What are the critiques of the bill from which sides? How do you guys plan to overcome those?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Just in terms of foreign policy speak, you have a bunch of different camps inside the Republican Party at this point, ranging from the very interventionist to the not only isolationist, but sometimes side with people who have typically been our enemies. There are a bunch of different strands inside the Republican foreign policy camp. kind of vacuum.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So I think that one of the things that you're pointing out here is the difficulty of making the sausage here. I mean, the reality is that, you know, as somebody who is a deficit hawk, somebody who really believes that the national debt is driving us to our doom, the reality is that the kind of major structural change that would be necessary in order to conquer the deficit and the debt
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
is not in this bill. And it's not going to be in any future bill until the American people actually shift their mindset about the deficit and the debt, which will require touching many of the entitlements that nobody apparently in either party actually has the desire to do. You've written before about touching means-tested welfare programs.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Obviously, there's some of that happening with regard to Medicaid, as you mentioned, the idea that it actually should have to work if you're an able-bodied person in order to receive Medicaid. The amount of work is something that's actually relatively negligible. It's like 80 hours a month. which is at best a kind of part-time job.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
But I think that when we see some of the fiscal hawks, people I agree with on principle, maybe Thomas Massey or Chip Roy, talk about the idea that we're going to completely redo the way that spending is done in the country in this bill. I mean, what you're really talking about that's realistic is cuts around the margins.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
You're not really talking about getting to the heart of the matter because frankly, the American people and their elected representatives are not up for that at this point. So the question is, do you want your taxes to rise or do you not want them to rise?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And it is a vacuum at this point because, again, President Trump does not have a thoroughgoing ideology, and there's a sort of Game of Thrones that's happening with regard to what foreign policy looks like in any given situation and on any given day.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
It's why you've seen a bunch of flip-flops on Ukraine, a bunch of flip-flops with regard to Gaza, a bunch of flip-flops on Iran, a bunch of flip-flops in the Middle East more generally, a bunch of flip-flops on TikTok in China. All of that is because the battle is ongoing. And Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has been tasked with sort of putting forward a more consistent face to that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So let's talk about the process from here. Obviously, let's assume that it passes through the lower house of Congress and now a version has to pass in the Senate. I mean, there's only a framework is my understanding in the Senate at this point. So they have to pass their own version of the bill.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Then the two sides have to get together and negotiate what will be the final version of the bill that actually passes. There's pretty substantial objections in the Senate to many of the moves that are currently being made in the house. This is still a very complex process. What does the timeline look like?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
I was doing Congressman Jody Arrington, the House Budget Committee chairman. So, Congressman Arrington, when you look at the possibility of passage, obviously, there's going to have to be pressure brought to bear to make sure this gets over the finish line. President Trump was doing some of that yesterday, I think actually quite effectively. I
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The markets have already priced in the passage of the bill. If this bill were to fail, if this were not to pass, the consequences could be pretty disastrous on the American economy, on investment, on everything else. I think that's sort of the unspoken pressure here is that taxes and a massive tax increase in this sort of fragile economy, that spells doom for a lot of folks.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Just to sum up where the Republican Party is in terms of foreign policy, again, there are a bunch of strands. There's one strand that no longer exists that is sort of the pinata for everybody else in the Republican Party. That is the Wilsonian interventionist strand that no longer exists in the Republican Party.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The idea of creating democracies in Afghanistan or Iraq, the very Wilsonian notion that Western principles could simply be implanted in foreign soil and then would grow there. That is gone in the Republican Party. It was killed by the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. So that's no longer there.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Well, that's Congressman Jody Arrington. Really appreciate your time, sir. And good luck on the bill. Thank you, Ben. It's an honor to be with you. Alrighty, folks. Also on the line to discuss the big, beautiful bill, we have the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt. Director, thanks so much for joining the program. Really appreciate the time. Yeah, you bet. Thanks.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So let's talk about this bill. Obviously, there's been a lot of heartburn, particularly by fiscal hawks about this bill's suggestion that the bill doesn't do enough to cut the national deficit. It adds to the deficit or adds to the debt. What's the truth about that?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So, Director, one of the things that I think is kind of interesting about this debate is that many of the fiscal hawks seem to be railing against what the bill is not rather than what the bill is. Meaning, would it be great if the bill actually took on mandatory entitlement programs in a far bigger way that actually moved towards solving
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
systemic national debt problem, which, of course, is going to accrue over the course of the next 10, 20 years. And the cost curve is being bent here, but it's not being bent to the extent that it totally solves our national debt or deficit crisis. But of course, it never was going to. The Republicans have a two vote majority, essentially, in the House.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And very often you see people in the Republican Party using that as sort of the foil for their own positions. But realistically speaking, nobody holds that. And pretty much nobody in the Republican Party has held that since about 2008. And then there are a wide variety of strands of what you would call realism, pursuing America's interest in the world.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
They have a three vote majority, if you include the vice president in the Senate. The sort of idea that there is going to be a widespread rejiggering of the entire way that America does its welfare state in this bill. I think that that is asking a little much.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
I assume that's why President Trump has been a little bit upset with, for example, Representative Thomas Massey, who's out there basically saying that unless we completely hamstring the entire welfare state, he's against.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So, Director, one of the other things that you've been working on, obviously, has been working closely with Doge with regard to going through the federal government, looking for cuts, waste, fraud, abuse, restructuring of the administrative state. What are your goals there? What should we be looking for from Doge in the future? Obviously, the first few months, there's been a lot of action.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
It's kind of unclear how many of those cuts are going to be made permanent, what actually can be done just purely at the executive level, as opposed to requiring some sort of confirmation from Congress. What's your view on what Doge is capable of doing in and of itself? What can be done just within the executive branch to stop spending, cut regulation, and what does require the help of Congress?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And there are, I think, a bunch of different varieties of that, ranging from the dovish variety of realism that suggests, well, if we withdraw from the world a little bit more, then the world will be friendlier to us, to the more hawkish version, which suggests that if we leave a vacuum, then somebody is going to fill that vacuum.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Director, one of the other questions, obviously, that's arising right now, Moody's recently downgraded the American debt, basically suggesting that, obviously, many of the problems we're talking about are systemic and on into the future. The timing of that Moody's decision, obviously, may be politically suspect. Moody's is not known for being particularly apolitical.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
With that said, much of what you're worried about over at OMB is specifically that. You are worried about the long-term national debt. What do you think are the next steps beyond this big... beautiful bill in the future for the rest of the Trump administration in terms of moving toward bringing America's fiscal house back toward order.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
I'd consider myself, full disclosure, in the sort of hawkish realist category. And then you have people who are full-scale isolationists who say we should just withdraw from the world totally. These are not dovish realists who believe that from time to time, the United States must be involved and that our involvement can be financial in terms of sanctions, but not military.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Well, that is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, one of the most transformative people in the American government, Russ Vogt. Really appreciate your time, sir. Thanks, Ben. Well, meanwhile, Elon Musk has now announced that he is likely to step back from his political involvement over the course of the next couple of years.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
He announced this at the Qatar Economic Forum in an interview with Bloomberg. Here was Elon Musk yesterday.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Okay, so there are a couple of things that are happening here. One is that Elon happens to be correct, actually, that when he injects himself into any political controversy in, say, a purple state, it actually sometimes creates the opposite effect.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So, for example, he spent an awful lot of money on a key Wisconsin Supreme Court race last month, but the negative publicity that emerged from him spending on that race actually may have outweighed the signal contribution that he made to the race. When it comes to presidential races, obviously, that is a different thing. And Democrats have attacked Musk. They've attacked his businesses.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
It is not a great shock that he is moving out of that realm. Obviously, many of his major businesses have suffered as a result of his contribution to the public discourse, his involvement in Doge and all the rest.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And this is a reminder that Democrats do not have that same incentive structure, that a lot of Democrats who have involved themselves, we're talking about people in business, at a very high level and continue to do so volubly with huge amounts of money. And they've never received the kind of public blowback that Elon Musk has received for having gotten involved in the political arena in that way.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Now, to be fair, Elon is obviously a lot more voluble than many of those other Democrats. Many of these Democrats are sort of behind the scenes contributing money. They're not out in front. They're not as publicly involved. going out there and holding chainsaws or flamethrowers or anything like that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
These would be people who say we shouldn't be involved in any of this stuff, period. So you have full-scale isolationists who basically say, don't want to do anything ranging from military action to foreign aid to building up the military at all. Let's just withdraw within our own borders.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
However, it is a reminder that while the right will constantly say the legacy media are dead, the impact of the left dead, that is obviously not totally true. And we should keep an eye out for it in the future because the pressures that were unleashed on Elon Musk here are very much still in play for other corporate heads.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Join now at dailywireplus.com, code DW40 to save 40% on all new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships. Well, yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went before a Senate hearing and Senate Democrats went after him.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
That's insane. I also am not sure I believe that. And the reason I don't believe that is because the Biden family has actually a pretty long and storied history of covering up actual cancer among members of its family. the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin, which has a lot of fascinating parts of it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
One of the parts of the book is a section where they talk about how the Biden family covered up Bo's cancer, actually.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The book explains, quote, Bo's cancer treatment also demonstrated the Biden's capacity for denial and the lengths that would go to avoid transparency about health issues, even when the person in question is an elected official, in this case, the sitting attorney general of Delaware. So in summer of 2013, Beau Biden had surgery because he had a stage four tumor removed from his brain afterward.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And he started looking very sick, obviously. He started looking very gaunt. In November 2013, Beau told a local reporter he had a clean bill of health after an exam. He remained the sitting attorney general of Delaware for the entirety of 2014, even while the family was secretly flying him all over the country for a variety of experimental treatments.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
In April 2014, he began having difficulties with speech. He would often enter hospitals under an alias, George Lincoln. Apparently, Bo's wife's Hallie didn't like this, but Joe Biden insisted on it. According to the book, making it public likely would have led people to rally around the family. He was an elected official, but both Biden and Bo opposed the disclosure.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
At times, Biden also instructed his team to mislead the media about his whereabouts. They would publicly say the vice president was going to Delaware for the weekend, then returning to D.C. the next week. That was technically true, but sometimes Biden flew to Houston, where Bo was receiving treatment to be with his eldest son over the weekend.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
That, again, all the questions that are being asked right now about the coverup of Joe Biden's health are perfectly legitimate. Like every single bit of it is perfectly legitimate. Do I believe that he just found out about his cancer last week? I have a very difficult time believing that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Why in the world would his last PSA be in 2014, 11 years ago, in the interim, he was vice president of the United States and president of the United States. And by the way, these sort of old guidance that you don't bother doing PSAs for older people because the cancer develops so slowly that if they're really old, they probably die of old age before the cancer kills them.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And then you have a group of people who have sort of horseshoe-theoried all the way around to the left and suggested that actually America's historic alliances are bad and we ought to be pursuing alliances with pariah states like, say, Russia or Iran. We should be making nice with China. We should be making nice with Qatar in more favorable ways, right?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The rates of survival of prostate cancer have increased dramatically over the course of the last 30, 40 years. And so, you know, my parents, my dad, obviously, as he gets older, he has a routine prostate exam and routine PSA, obviously, as he should. It is ridiculous not to. And when you're talking about the vice president and president of the United States, why would you not? Why would you not?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
This is insane. Well, Tapper and Thompson are making the rounds. And Tapper and Thompson said yesterday that even Biden's top aides were astonished by the fact that the media were so complicit in the cover up.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And that was on Megyn Kelly's show. Megyn really held Jake's feet to the fire with regard to his coverage of Joe Biden's health conditions, suggesting that he should have done more. And Tapper himself acknowledged that he certainly should have done more.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And that goes to deeper questions about why the legacy media were so complicit in Biden's health cover-up when it was perfectly obvious to everyone with the naked eye that Joe Biden was in the middle of a health decline. Would they have been quite as conciliatory to the Trump administration if Trump were in the middle of a real health collapse?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Well, according to Tapper, the person driving the decision making in the White House was Hunter Biden, which is just insane. That's just crazy towns. If you're wondering who the real president was, the answer was combo of Jill and Hunter appears to be the answer. Here was Jake Tapper explaining.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
That is a strand of Republican foreign policy thought as well. So all of those are battling it out. And it's Marco Rubio's job as Secretary of State to sort of articulate where the administration is on all of this. And he does an excellent job because the truth is that's a pretty tough job. That is. And the Republican Party at this point is very, very fractious.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Okay, so again, all this was out there. The big unanswered question, of course, that we all know the answer to is why didn't the media cover it better? The answer is because they wanted Joe Biden to win. What's amazing is watching some of the left-wing members of the media not do what Jake Tapper is doing. Tapper, at least, is doing a mea culpa.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Jake is at least going out there and saying, yeah, I should have covered this better. My mistake. And again, you can take or leave the... Well, you can either take it or leave it, what he's saying, but at least he is saying the thing. That is not the case with, say, Joe Scarborough.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Joe Scarborough, like a couple of weeks before Joe Biden went on national TV and died, said that Joe Biden was at his best ever and you were crazy if you didn't think so. He is still kind of holding by that now, which is just wild.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Oh, no. Oh, no. Again, like, am I allowed to ask about bias now? I mean, now we all know. Like, really? Seriously? Yeah. Again, when people change their opinions based on new facts or when they apologize for screwing it up the first place, that is better than this.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Whoopi Goldberg, by the way, continues to claim that there was no way, there were no outside indicators that Joe Biden was ever in decline, except for your own eyes, lady. Here she was.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
The administration itself is very fractious when it comes to foreign policy. Clearly, there are a lot of ongoing arguments, but President Trump is the central decision maker. And again, his sort of foreign policy philosophy is much more ad hoc than it is a sort of thoroughgoing, principled version of American foreign policy.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
When did I know that it was bad? When I watched him do things. That is the answer to that question. That's when we all knew that it was bad. Come on. Come on. But the deeper the Democrats dig this hole, the harder it's going to be for them to get out of it. They really should just say, we were wrong. We thought he could get through it. We thought maybe he would recover. It was a cover-up. Our bad.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
That's the best they can do. Seriously. But they're not actually doing it. Again, just another reason I should point out why I think AOC continues to do well in the is sort of outside the Democratic Party.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
I've cited Matt Continetti, the political commentator, to the point before that people who tend to be successful electorally in presidential politics first run against their own party and then only afterwards they run in a general. AOC is well positioned to do that. She's sort of from the Bernie Sanders wing, certainly not inside the Biden wing.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Well, apparently a brand new coefficient survey conducted May 7th to May 9th found that 26% identified Ocasio-Cortez as the face of the Democratic Party. 26% said there is no one currently leading the party. 22% chose other. Ocasio-Cortez was ahead of the second place finisher. That second place finisher was Bernie Sanders, who is likely to be her supporter.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Jasmine Crockett placed third in the survey with 8%. All these so-called establishment Democrats are stuck 6, 5, 4%. Cory Booker, despite his bizarre Mr. Potato Head routine on the Senate floor, is stuck at 4%. I think people are underestimating AOC at their own peril. And let's be real about this. Democrats right now who are complaining about AOC will get behind her if they are forced to do so.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
James Carville, who is way too smart to get behind the sort of AOC bizarro wing party, he says that he would back AOC.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
You know, if they can't stand the way AOC is, it's going to be very difficult for them to stop her. She's got one entire lane of the Democratic Party to herself, that far left lane. She's got huge name recognition. She's got Bernie Sanders' base of support. She's probably got finance from that wing of the party.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
In any case, here was Senator Jackie Rosen going up against the Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Everybody on the right who's very sanguine about this, by the way, oh, we'll definitely beat AOC. I'd just like to recall a person named Barack Obama who was running against the establishment Democrat, Hillary Clinton, and ended up being a two-term president. So don't be sanguine about anything, I think should be the message of the last 20 years in American politics at the very, very least.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Meanwhile, the Europeans are apparently angry at Israel for, you know, trying to destroy Hamas. That continues to be the pattern. That's nothing new, by the way. The Europeans were very angry at Israel for surviving the 1973 war. They were angry at Israel for attacking the Osirak reactor. They've been historically angry at Israel for defending itself.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Now, the British government, which, again, is subject to a very large Muslim population and also is very left-wing government, and the French government, run by the absolutely ridiculous and politically vile Emmanuel Macron,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
is also calling on Israel to stop its final moves against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that Hamas is not surrendering the hostages and continues to wield enough authority in the Gaza Strip to kill people who oppose it. The same from the Canadians. None of this is a giant shock.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
According to the EU, EU foreign policy chief Kaha Kalas announced that the bloc of 27 countries would begin a formal review of its trade accord with Israel. A huge majority, Kalas said, of EU foreign ministers backed a proposal to reconsider the deal, which includes provisions on international human rights law.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
A spokesperson for Israel's foreign ministry said that this reflects a total misunderstanding of the complex reality Israel is facing. Now, To be fair, part of this is Israel's fault. Israel should have moved faster. We are now 19 months in to the October 7th war. Israel should not have had itself stopped by the Biden administration.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Certainly since President Trump took over, they should have moved faster in Gaza. They should move fast now. The reality is that large swaths of the West do not understand how war works. They do not understand what Hamas is. They do not understand the notion of trade-offs.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
They don't understand that war is necessarily ugly, particularly when one of those sides is a terrorist regime hell-bent on civilian casualties and holding hostages. That's just the reality of the situation. Israel should have moved faster. But now, given the situation, should Israel finish the job or should they leave Hamas in control with hostages under their control?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
What exactly is the alternative being posed by the EU? The EU, of course, has always been a... an organization filled with foreign policy cowards. So that of course is no shock.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
By the way, it is worth noting here that while the EU is considering sanctioning Israel essentially for finishing off a terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, the EU is trying to lift sanctions on Syria, which is run by a literal honest to God terrorist group backed by the Turkish government
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
that just a few weeks ago we were discussing was trying to slaughter the Druze and not just a few Christians, apparently. And so the EU is like, no sanctions on the Syrian terrorist group, sanctions on Israel, which I think shows you exactly where their head is at. Pretty amazing stuff from the EU, but I would expect nothing more and nothing less.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
All right, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now. We are going to get to the beautiful relationship between Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson. And we have new details from the New York Times, just beautiful and inspiring details of a wonderful relationship. Remember, in order to watch, you do have to be a member. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Okay, so again, it is funny to me that Democratic senators think that the chief concern of the American people at this point is, you know, how many women are going to be in the State Department or women's issues in Afghanistan. I mean, it just is not a central, it has not been a central plank for Democrats either. The difference is that President Trump doesn't tend to do these sort of
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
sycophantic appearance-based foreign policy in which you claim that you're for women's rights while abandoning 19 million women to the predations of the Taliban in Afghanistan the way Joe Biden did. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who may be the dumbest member of the United States Senate outside of Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, he suggested that he regretted voting for Rubio.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Rubio, of course, sailed through as Secretary of State with flying colors, selling 99 votes in the Senate. Here was Van Hollen saying he regrets voting for Rubio, and Rubio's like, good, I wear that as a badge of honor.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And the reason that they went after him is because they're very concerned about President Trump's policy, both with regard to immigration and also with regard to generalized foreign policy. And that is because Trump is, in fact, a break from the past on both of those issues. President Trump has created consensus around illegal immigration.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
By the way, what I love about Chris Van Hollen is Chris Van Hollen says something scummy like that. Rubio comes back at him. He's like, now he's playing the victim. And Rubio continued to own Van Hollen throughout, like over and over and over. So Van Hollen, of course, had traveled down to El Salvador to visit with the accused wife beater, Kilma Abrego Garcia, accused MS-13 member.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
who was deported. Van Hollen went down and had drinks with the guy. And Marco Rubio was like, let's talk about Camargo Garcia, Senator.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Okay. Okay. Well, it didn't go well for Chris Van Hollen. Rubio also slammed Chris Van Hollen on judicial overreach. Here he was.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Okay, when it came to immigration, again, this is where Rubio was the strongest. And that, of course, is because that is an area where the Trump administration is incredibly consistent. So Rubio was asked about the visas of people who are here as guests and whether they should be revoked based on things they say. And here's what he had to say.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Or more realistically, Joe Biden created consensus around illegal immigration that was largely dependent on him opening the borders wide. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken a lead role in helping to enforce President Trump's vision of immigration in the United States, which is to say closed southern border. And also, if people come here,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So, again, there's Marco Rubio going up against Chris Van Hollen and saying, listen, we don't have to let anybody into the country we don't want in the country. If you're admitted here as a student and then you are working in cahoots with organizations that support terrorist groups, then, yeah, we are going to deport you.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
As he says, again, quite correctly, we admit people to this country or we should based on the national interest.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Of course, he's exactly right about that. We'll get to more on this in just one moment first. Despite all the stuff happening in Washington, ultimately, you have to take responsibility for safeguarding your own financial future. That's why I just bought more gold from Birch Gold. In the past 12 months, the value of gold has increased by 40%.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
With central banks buying gold in record quantities, demand does not appear to be subsiding anytime soon. Again, when you look at the bond markets, when you look at the fiscal future of the United States, when you look at our burgeoning national debt, uncertainty in the world, Just text my name, Ben. To 989898, Birch Gold will send you a free info kit on gold.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
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The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And then when you feel comfortable, think about diversifying into precious metals with my friends over at Birch Gold. Also, did you know that over 85% of grass-fed beef sold in the United States is imported? Luckily, Good Ranchers holds themselves to a higher standard. At goodranchers.com, products are 100% born, raised, and harvested right here in the United States from local family farms.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So you can rest easy knowing exactly where the meat you're eating comes from. Plus, there are no antibiotics ever, no added hormones, no seed oils. Just one simple ingredient you can read. That's me. Best of all, Good Ranchers is tariff-proof due to their 100% American supply chain.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So while new tariffs make grocery store prices unpredictable, Good Ranchers stays consistent and predictable, even delivering straight to your door for ultimate convenience. Now, a lot of my friends have been using Good Ranchers. I know that producer Savvy, her son basically goes through a giant shipment of Good Ranchers almost every day. That kid is a, that kid's a monster. He's huge.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Better meat, stable prices, less waste. That's just smarter shopping for you and your family. Lock in a secure supply of American meat at a steady price today and support American farmers and ranchers. Subscribe right now at GoodRanchers.com. Get free meat for life and 40 bucks off with code Ben. That's 40 bucks off plus free meat for life with code Ben. Good Ranchers, American meat delivered.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
As guests, they do not get to stay here if they are interested in overthrowing the American system, in supporting terrorist groups, or all of the rest. Democrats, of course, have a much more open borders view of what America ought to be. They believe that for some odd reason, the United States owes it to literally everyone on earth to let everyone on earth in.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Now, again, the more fraught questions were not even about illegal immigration because Democrats are just in the wrong here and they are getting destroyed over this issue. Politically speaking, it's one of the reasons why President Trump retains his high popularity rating at this point. The bigger issues are about overall American foreign policies.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
And as I've suggested, there's a lot of competition inside the Trump administration for what happens on a variety of issues. Rubio is asked about whether the United States is withdrawing from the world. Here's what he had to say.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Now, again, as an aspect of this, Rubio was asked about aid to Ukraine because there have been some mixed signals coming out from the administration about what happens next if Vladimir Putin does not come to the table. Jeanne Shaheen, who's the senator from New Hampshire, she asked him about arms shipments to Ukraine. And here was Secretary of State Rubio's response.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
OK, so again, that should be the perspective of the administration. I think it remains an open question as to which direction the administration takes. Again, that's because President Trump's policies are quite ad hoc.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
Now, I understand that when it comes to President Trump's foreign policy, the sort of madman theory of politics has been posited by President Trump and members of his administration. The idea that unpredictability is an asset when it comes to foreign negotiations, for example. And there is certainly truth to that. There's certainly truth to that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
If, for example, China doesn't actually know whether we are going to go to war with them over Taiwan, they are less likely to go after Taiwan than if we're going to be like Joe Biden and make non-credible threats or if we make no threats at all. The sort of man-man theory of politics certainly applies there.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
However, when it comes to, for example, an intransigent enemy who's already at war with a third party country with whom we are allied, then actually unpredictability and mess in the system leads to perception of weakness. And this is one of the problems with regard to Ukraine.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2204 - Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats
So for example, the New York Times reporting today that for months, President Trump has been threatening to simply walk away from the frustrating negotiations for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. After a phone call on Monday between President Trump and President Putin of Russia, that appears to be exactly what the American president is doing.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
Is in orbit. They always ask me, like, do you want to die on Mars? And I say, well, yes, but not on impact.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
They call it, like, Trump derangement syndrome. And you don't realize how real this is until, like, you can't reason with people. So, like, I was at a friend's birthday party in LA, just a birthday dinner. And it was, like, a nice, quiet dinner, and everyone was behaving normally.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
And I happened to mention, this was before the election, like a month or two before, I happened to mention the president's name. And it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies, okay? And they're like, wow! I'm like, what is wrong? Guys, you just can't have a normal conversation. And it's like they become completely irrational.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
I think President Trump is a good man. And he's, you know...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
There's something nice about it. It really is. You know, because, I mean, the president has been so unfairly attacked in the media. It's really outrageous. And I've, at this point, spent a lot of time with the president. And not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or wrong. Not once.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
The president will make these executive orders, which are very sensible and good for the country, but then they don't get implemented. So if you take, for example, all the funding for the migrant hotels, the president issued an executive order, hey, we need to stop taking taxpayer money and paying for luxury hotels for illegal immigrants, which makes no sense.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
Obviously, people do not want their tax dollars going to fund high-end hotels for illegals. And yet they were still doing that, even as late as last week. And so, you know, we went in there and we're like, this is a violation of the presidential executive order. It needs to stop. So...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
So what we're doing here is one of the biggest functions of the Doge team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2156 - Trump SLASHES AND BURNS Through Department of Education!
As a function of the great policies of President Trump and his administration, and as an act of faith in America, Tesla is going to double vehicle output in the United States within the next two years.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2156 - Trump SLASHES AND BURNS Through Department of Education!
Yes, well, the CyberCab starts production in Texas next year. And it's self-driving. We have so much confidence in the self-driving nature of it that it will actually not have a steering wheel. It will not have pedals. It will either self-drive or not drive at all. But it will self-drive.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
And then the speed, the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions, we post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been, I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
And so, you know, the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very simple and basic.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
At a high level, you say, well, what, how exactly, how do you, how, how, What are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion? And it's really two things, competence and caring. And if you add competence and caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, basically.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand. I mean, any, you know, we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes. So, you know, I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly. I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
You couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted... We have a majority of the public voting for President Trump. We won the House. We won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
If there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
And then we were told, this is actually, I think, a great anecdote, because we were told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. And we're like, well, why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It's manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine. And like, what do you mean a mine?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2137 - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!
Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork. And you look at a picture of this mine. We'll post some pictures afterwards. And this mine looks like something out of the 50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a time warp.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2131 - Trump and Musk Bring The CHAINSAW
As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms. There is no apple. You've just got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It's beyond repair. So really, none of this could be done without the full support of the president. I went over it with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2131 - Trump and Musk Bring The CHAINSAW
I actually checked with him a few times. Are you sure? I'm like, yes. So we're shutting it down.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2155 - Stock Market PLUNGES…So What’s Next?!
Our interest payments are higher than our Defense Department budget. That's, I think, was the real wake-up call for me, was looking at seeing that the interest payments, the national debt, exceeded the Defense Department budget. And that was only growing over time, which meant if we didn't do something about this, then there won't be any money for anything.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2155 - Stock Market PLUNGES…So What’s Next?!
Yeah, I mean, really, I just don't want America to go bankrupt.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2209 - Elon’s Farewell and Trump’s Tariff War Dead?
I actually thought that when this big, beautiful bill came along. I mean, like, everything he's done on Doge gets wiped out in the first year. I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2147 - HUGE: The Washington Post SURRENDERS…To Reality!
It's ironic, but it's true.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2147 - HUGE: The Washington Post SURRENDERS…To Reality!
I actually just call myself a humble tech support here, because this is actually, as crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing, is helping fix the government computer systems. Many of these systems are extremely old. They don't communicate. There are a lot of mistakes in the systems. The software doesn't work. So we are actually textbook.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2174 - WHAT COMES NEXT?! Trump’s Tariff War Continues…
I'm hopeful, for example, with the tariffs that at the end of the day, I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
Well, I think excess regulation... You know, taxes do ratchet up every year, making it a little harder every year as taxes ratchet up. But the regulatory creep is, I think, a massive danger. So laws and regulations are immortal. But the regulators and the lawmakers make new rules and regulations and laws and regulations every year.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
And so every year, you've got this sort of another layer of laws and regulations. It starts getting to the point where everything's illegal. You can't get anything done. You say, well, how did they deal with it in the past? Well, the way they dealt with it in the past, there'd be a war. And the war would wash away the old rules and regulations. We literally would take a war to change things.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
You know, like Napoleon establishing the Napoleonic Code that overrode the old law systems of the lords and peasants. For all the bad that Napoleon did, I think he did more good, actually. So the evidence is in that I think maybe a third or a half of all countries on Earth still run on the Napoleonic Code.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
And I would prefer to have some cleanup process for laws and regulations that doesn't require a wall. That'd be nice. And I think that's something we need to institute, like basically garbage collection for laws and regulations.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
Yeah. Well, and regulation in the U.S. varies by state as well. California is the most regulated state. So increasingly people seek to do things outside of California or outside of New York. Those are the two most heavily regulated states.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
There's regulations which are intended to serve the public good, You know, rules against one thing or another. Like the car industry gets, you know, has lots of rules in how to make a car. I mean, there'll be like piles of books in this room to cover just the U.S. regulations for what is required to build a car. Those are, at least ostensibly, they're aimed for safety.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
But, you know, in terms of other regulations, Yeah, I think generally we want to be averse to any regulation that is anti-meritocratic. The point of fighting racism, sexism, and whatnot was not to replace it with another form of racism and sexism, but it was rather to get rid of racism and get rid of sexism, not change it to another form. And DEI is fundamentally racist and sexist.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
Basically, the reality is that the government is really just a corporation in the limit. Government is the ultimate corporation. It's not different for a corporation. It's just the ultimate corporation. And it's a corporation that is a monopoly and also it can't go bankrupt unless the country goes bankrupt and has a monopoly on violence.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
So how much more do you want to give to the world's biggest corporation that has a monopoly on violence? Probably less. And if you look at, say, countries like East and West Germany or North and South Korea, cases where there's just an arbitrary line that's been drawn that could just be one country, arbitrary line that's drawn because of a war.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
What is the productivity difference from one to the other? You know, West Germany had a productivity five times greater than East Germany. And it's not like West Germany was just this sort of bastion of capitalism. They're like half-socialist.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
So what that means is if they have socialists and the other side is 100% socialist or communist, then you really have something like a 10 to 1 difference in productivity if something is done by the government or done by the private sector. That's why you, but I'm not someone who says abolish the government.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Trump’s Team: Best Ben Shapiro Show Moments
I just say, let's have the government do the least amount because the less the government does, the more the economy will prosper because anything done by the government is going to be five to 10 times less efficient. Like think of the DMV.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2168 - TRADE WAR: Trump Declares Massive Car Tariffs
For you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?
The Best One Yet
💡 “Ideas = Currency” — TED Talks’ CEO audition. Costco’s girl math. ‘Musking’ the US Gov’t.
Which started as an idea.
The Brett Cooper Show
The Growing Regret Among Trans Teens | Episode 13
I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier, This was before I had really any understanding of what was going on. We had COVID going on, so there was a lot of confusion. And, you know, I was told, oh, Xavier might commit suicide. That was a lie right from the outset? Incredibly evil.
The Brett Cooper Show
The Growing Regret Among Trans Teens | Episode 13
and I agree with you that people that have been promoting this should go to prison.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1012: Sam Stein: Elon Is Toxic
They think it's well, it's just, you know, some kind of judicial thing that's not that important. But actually what they're doing, what's happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives. That is why it is so significant.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1012: Sam Stein: Elon Is Toxic
And whichever party controls the house, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. So it's like, I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's gonna affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will. Yeah.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Vance is Right: Germany Isn't Free
They call it like Trump derangement syndrome. And you don't realize how real this is until, like, it's, you can't reason with people. So, like, I was at a friend's birthday party in LA, just a birthday dinner. And it was like a nice, quiet dinner, and everyone was behaving normally.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Vance is Right: Germany Isn't Free
And I happened to mention, this was before the election, like a month or two before, I happened to mention the president's name. And it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies. Okay? And they're like, wow! I'm like, what is wrong? Guys, like you can't have a normal conversation. And it's like it's like that become completely irrational.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Elon vs. The BBB
I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Sad, Disinvited RINOS + Elon & Vance + Maine Defies Trump
You know, I've known him for 30 years. Yeah. And I've never seen anybody take as much as he's taken. Yeah. And we've discussed this, and I'm like, how do you deal with it?
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Sad, Disinvited RINOS + Elon & Vance + Maine Defies Trump
Well, you would say that to me. I'm like, what am I going to do, worry about it? And, you know, and then culminating in two assassination attempts, which resulted in your endorsement. Well, I was going to do it anyway, but that was a precipitating event.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Sad, Disinvited RINOS + Elon & Vance + Maine Defies Trump
The day of the assassination.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Sad, Disinvited RINOS + Elon & Vance + Maine Defies Trump
Yeah. I just sped it up, but I was going to do it anyway.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The DOGE Super-Geniuses Speak Out
Sort of at a high level, you should think of this as we want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud, reduce the spending by 15%, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not efficient, and there's a lot of... A lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The DOGE Super-Geniuses Speak Out
Yes. And they steal people's social security is what happens is they call in. They say they claim to be a retiree. And they convince the Social Security person on the phone to change where the money is flowing. It actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day, every day. And then somebody doesn't receive their Social Security.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The DOGE Super-Geniuses Speak Out
It's because of all the fraud loopholes in the Social Security system.
The Daily
Two Billionaires’ Big Plan to Shrink Government
Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that.
The Daily
Two Billionaires’ Big Plan to Shrink Government
We're going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.
The Daily
Two Billionaires’ Big Plan to Shrink Government
America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is going to be amazing.
The Daily
Two Billionaires’ Big Plan to Shrink Government
It's great to be here because I watch your show.
The Daily
Two Billionaires’ Big Plan to Shrink Government
Very excited, because it's going to be very easy.
The Daily
Two Billionaires’ Big Plan to Shrink Government
And I'm very proud of him. I can't imagine what it would be.
The Daily
A Constitutional Crisis
We have this unelected a fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative. And this is not something that people want.
The Daily
A Constitutional Crisis
Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand. I mean, we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
We're obviously seeing some crazy stuff in D.C. where it seems like any federal judge can stop any action by the president, the of the United States. This is insane. This has got to stop. It's got to stop at the federal level and at the state level. But let me first hand out two $1 million checks in appreciation.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
OK. So the first check goes to Nicholas Jacobs.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Musk's Gov't Purge, Trump's J6 Revenge, Is Any of This Legal? | Nicole Avant
My name's Edward.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Musk's Gov't Purge, Trump's J6 Revenge, Is Any of This Legal? | Nicole Avant
This weekend, Musk taking aim at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which is in charge of dispensing tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Musk's Gov't Purge, Trump's J6 Revenge, Is Any of This Legal? | Nicole Avant
As we got into us that USAID it became apparent that what we have here is is not an apple with a woman it but we have actually just a bowl of worms. And so it's a point which you don't really like you could go to Apple has got a woman may even take the warm out, but if you've got actually just a bowl of worms. It's hopeless. And USID is a ball of worms. There is no apple.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Musk's Gov't Purge, Trump's J6 Revenge, Is Any of This Legal? | Nicole Avant
And when there is no apple, you've just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | Best of Lewis Black in 2024
Elon Musk is telling ChatGBT to hurt his beard. He just launched a new artificial intelligence venture named Grok.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | Best of Lewis Black in 2024
For over 20 years now, Apple stores have hosted Apple Camp. This is where kids and their parents can get creative on the latest Apple devices. This year's session focuses on using the iPad to create an interactive storybook.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump's $5M Immigrant "Gold Card," Elon's First Cabinet Meeting, | Rosebud Baker
And I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
DOGE Protestors Turn on Tesla & Astronauts Make It Home | Anthony Carrigan
Yeah, I mean, it's really come as quite a shock to me that there is this level of really hatred and violence from the left. Tesla is a peaceful company. We've never done anything awful. I've never done anything awful. I've only done productive things.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Crashes the Oval Office, Trump Pushes Gaza Takeover | Colman Domingo
If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. So it's incredibly important that the president, the House, and the Senate decide what happens as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Crashes the Oval Office, Trump Pushes Gaza Takeover | Colman Domingo
So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been... I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Crashes the Oval Office, Trump Pushes Gaza Takeover | Colman Domingo
Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, like, wait a second. Hey, Elon, that seems like maybe that's, you know, there's a conflict there. I feel like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately, you know?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Crashes the Oval Office, Trump Pushes Gaza Takeover | Colman Domingo
Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Crashes the Oval Office, Trump Pushes Gaza Takeover | Colman Domingo
So, you know, there's crazy things like just cursory examination of Social Security, and we've got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who's 150? I don't, okay. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. They're missing out. So...
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Crashes the Oval Office, Trump Pushes Gaza Takeover | Colman Domingo
Now, do you know anyone who's 150? I don't. Okay. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. They're missing out. Oh, snap.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Elon Crashes the Oval Office, Trump Pushes Gaza Takeover | Colman Domingo
I am aspirationally, you know, aspirationally funny. So, yeah.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
I changed my title to Techno King. And by the way, this is a formal SEC filing. I'm legally a formal whatever, Techno King. I just did that as kind of like a joke.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms. And so at the point at which you don't really, like if you've got an apple that's got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you've got actually just a ball of worms, It's hopeless. And USID is a ball of worms. There is no apple.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
And when there is no apple, you've just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
Eventually you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet, drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. So it's incredibly important that the president, the House, and the Senate decide what happens as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been, I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say like, wait a second, hey, Elon, that seems like maybe that's, you know, there's a conflict there. I feel like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately, you know?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
So, you know, there's crazy things like just cursory examination of Social Security, and we've got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who's 150? I don't. Okay. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. They're missing out.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
Now, do you know anyone who's 150? I don't. Okay. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. They're missing out.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
I am aspirationally, you know, aspirationally funny. So, yeah.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
I didn't really know how to drive the McLaren because it's like a difficult car to drive, and I floored it. and did a lane change, and the bracket wheels broke loose, and the car spun around. And then we hit the embankment and knocked the car into the air, which continued spinning like a discus, like three feet in the air. That's right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
No hands, no feet, nothing. Like promised repeatedly. I'm confident that in less than a year, you'll be able to go from highway on ramp to highway exit without touching any control.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
I'm quite confident that within three years, The call will be able to take you from point to point. You could be asleep the whole time.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
I think we're basically less than two years away from complete autonomy.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
We hit that. Cross-country from LA to New York by the end of the year, fully autonomous. Extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
I don't want to give the impression that I thought Tesla would be successful from the beginning. I actually thought we would fail. We were only a few days from bankruptcy. It was literally two days. It pushed him to the brink.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
But don't worry, it's not like he's got an army or anything. I went to Russia to look at buying a refurbished ICBM, which is a very trippy experience. Okay, maybe worry a little.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
Uh, I don't think that's correct. I mean, I was literally living in the factory. If there's, like, toxic fumes, I'm breathing them. Okay.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
TDS Time Machine | President Elon
You basically have to hate humanity if you don't like that future.
The Dan Bongino Show
Did President Trump Just Hint At His Next Target? (w/ Ned Ryun) | Episode 52
I actually thought that when this big, beautiful bill came along. I mean, like, everything he's done on Doge gets wiped out in the first year. I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful.
The Dan Bongino Show
Nightly Scroll - Woman Berated Over MAHA Hat in Gym Incident Speaks Out!
Look, I mean, like San Francisco, you could shoot heroin while taking a dump on the mayor's car in front of City Hall, okay? And nothing would happen to you. But if you walk down the street with a MAGA hat, you're going to get attacked, right?
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Wasn’t Bluffing: Cutesy Time Is OVER At FBI | Episode 3
They rolled the slots, like those old people at the casino.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Wasn’t Bluffing: Cutesy Time Is OVER At FBI | Episode 3
This is what happened to my car.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Wasn’t Bluffing: Cutesy Time Is OVER At FBI | Episode 3
War. Somebody destroyed my car.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Wasn’t Bluffing: Cutesy Time Is OVER At FBI | Episode 3
No, we definitely offered to return the astronauts earlier. There's no question about that. SpaceX could have brought the astronauts back after a few months at most. And we made that offer to the Biden administration. It was rejected for political reasons. And that's just a fact.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Trump and Elon Tag Team Rock The Deep State (Ep. 2421)
Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted... We have a majority of the public voting for President Trump. We've won the House. We've won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Trump and Elon Tag Team Rock The Deep State (Ep. 2421)
The people voted for major government reform, and that's what the people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times, you know, people that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about.
The Dan Bongino Show
America's A-Team Hits The Ground Running (Ep. 2432)
The overall goal here with the Doge team is to help We simply cannot sustain, as a country, $2 trillion deficits. Just the interest on the national debt now exceeds the Defense Department's spending. We spend a lot on the Defense Department, but we're spending over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt. It's not an optional thing.
The Dan Bongino Show
America's A-Team Hits The Ground Running (Ep. 2432)
It is an essential thing. That's the reason I'm here.
The Dan Bongino Show
America's A-Team Hits The Ground Running (Ep. 2432)
Yes. To be clear, I think that email perhaps was best interpreted as a performance review. But actually, it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? So if you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email. This is, I think, not a high bar, is what I'm saying. Anyone could accomplish this.
The Dan Bongino Show
America's A-Team Hits The Ground Running (Ep. 2432)
But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond. And some people who are not real people, like they're literally fictional individuals that are collecting paychecks. Well, somebody's collecting paychecks on a fictional individual.
The Dan Bongino Show
America's A-Team Hits The Ground Running (Ep. 2432)
So we're literally trying to figure out, are these people real? Are they alive? And can they write an email?
The Dan Bongino Show
JD Vance on Working for Trump, VP Harris and the Power of Memes | Episode 4
Tesla is a peaceful company. We've never done anything awful. He's right. We've never done anything awful. We've only done productive things. He's right. So I think we just have... They're laughing at him. ...a deranged... There's some kind of mental illness thing going on here because this doesn't make any sense.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
We have this petition, you know, sort of against activist judges because judges should be simply interpreting the law and not making the law. Amen. So in appreciation for the support of people in signing this petition against activist judges, we just want judges to be judges, which is a reasonable thing to ask for. We're obviously seeing some crazy stuff in D.C.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
I guess take it if you want. I think we'll get you a real one, too.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
What we're announcing is kind of like a block captain program where somebody can sign up to knock on doors in their zip code and encourage people to, well, make people aware that there is a vote and then aware of how important the vote is. So you can sign up to be kind of a block captain for your zip code on the America PAC website right now. Yeah.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
And if you do, it's basically $20 for just taking a photo with somebody. It's pretty straightforward. You just knock on doors in your neighborhood and give them either a digital or a paper picture of you know, Justice Brad Schimel. It can be an approximation. It doesn't have to be exact. And they just have to say, thumbs up and hold a picture of Judge Schimel. And that's it. And you get $20.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
That's it. It's pretty easy. It's easy money. So... But... The whole point of it is just to make people aware of the election and say that there is an election. It's on Tuesday, and it's super important. Please vote.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
The importance of the election on Tuesday is gigantic. It could decide the future of the House of Representatives. It could decide then the future of America and the future of the world. So it's absolutely critical that you really, you need to just drag friends and family to vote on Tuesday for Justice Schimel and for voter ID.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
Thanks for coming. What do you think of my hat? All right, I'm going to sign the hat and I'm going to throw it out.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
We also need to turn off the massive financial incentive for illegals to come to the United States and stay in the United States. And this is really the thing that is causing the Democrats to lose their mind. Because they're actually spending, at this point, tens of billions to attract and retain illegals in the United States. It's really on that scale. It's a gigantic number.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
And the goal is to turn all the swing states blue. That means Wisconsin. So that's the goal. So with the asylum program, they can get a green card within a year, and then they can get citizenship as quickly as four years after getting a green card.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
No ID. This is worth just reiterating. People sometimes think that under the Biden administration that he was simply asleep at the switch. He was asleep. They were asleep at the switch. He was.
The Dan Bongino Show
Wisconsin Decides The Future Of The World | Episode 11 - 03/31/25
It was a massive, large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent, deep blue, one-party state from which there would be no escape.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
Well, this is a revolution. And I think it might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution. But at the end of the day, America is going to be in much better shape. America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work. And it's going to be a fantastic future. But are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way? Absolutely.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
One of the things I learned at PayPal was, you know who complains the loudest and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
For example, there were over $300 million of small business administration loans that has been given out to people under the age of 11.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
So the youngest recipient of a small business administration loan is a nine-month-old, which is a very cautious baby we're talking about here.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
Unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink. That's why we're doing it.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It's mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
For example, the simple survey that was... Literally a 10-question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey cost you about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that. For just the survey? A billion dollars for a simple online survey. Do you like the national park? And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
So the survey would just go into nothing. It was like insane.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
Some point, 100 days? Not really a report. We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day that passes, our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
Almost half. Yes, and they steal people's social security is what happens. As they call in, they claim to be a retiree, and they convince the social security person on the phone to change where the money is flowing.
The Dan Bongino Show
White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Joins The Show | Ep. 10 - 03/28/25
Why would you have 1,400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone?
The Dan Bongino Show
Trump Joins The Show To Drop Massive Truth Bombs (Ep. 2403)
I did actually have the fine secured. And there was a big trial in San Francisco, a big civil trial. And the jury found me not guilty. Unanimous finding of a San Francisco jury. The reason I agreed to the fine for the SEC is not because the SEC was correct. That was extremely bad behavior by the SEC. Corruption, frankly. But if I did not agree to pay the fine...
The Dan Bongino Show
Trump Joins The Show To Drop Massive Truth Bombs (Ep. 2403)
Tesla would have gone bankrupt immediately. So I was told by our CFO that the banks would immediately suspend our lines of credit. And if they suspend our lines of credit at that time, we would have gone bankrupt instantly. So there would never have been an opportunity for a trial because Tesla would be dead.
The Dan Bongino Show
Trump Joins The Show To Drop Massive Truth Bombs (Ep. 2403)
So really, this is like someone holding a gun to your kid's head and saying, pay $20 million. This is like hostage negotiation.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Share & Scrotox & Tell with Katie Nolan, Michael Cruz Kayne Nolan and Pablo Torre
I don't have a lifetime of playing video games. At one point, I was... Maybe one of the best Quake players in the world. You're actually a world-class, incredible video game player. Yeah. You're also, with the Paragon board and the build, you're also an innovator there. Yeah. I've played a lot of video games.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO - Share & DOGE & Tell with Mina Kimes, Dan Le Batard, and Pablo Torre
Yeah, because we're cutting off their graph machine. So that's what they're upset about.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Charisma Teacher: Psychology Of Why People Don't Like You! People Are Attracted To These Traits! The Secret To Being Instantly Likeable!
We have to reduce spending to live within our means. And... Yeah, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.
The Glenn Beck Program
Senate Republicans Just Caved on Cutting Inflation | Guest: Daniel Horowitz | 2/21/25
Yeah, I mean, I thought we were sort of heading for a point of no return, really, you know? And so that's why it was so essential that President Trump win the election and that there be a Republican majority in the House and Senate, which, thanks to you, that has been accomplished.
The Glenn Beck Program
Senate Republicans Just Caved on Cutting Inflation | Guest: Daniel Horowitz | 2/21/25
Well, at this point, I'm like, I'm not sure how much of the left is even real, you know?
The Glenn Beck Program
Senate Republicans Just Caved on Cutting Inflation | Guest: Daniel Horowitz | 2/21/25
Yeah, yeah, like, literally, you see, like, these sort of fake rallies where there's, like, hardly any people. And the media will, like, frame it and, like, you know, get all six people, you know, in the frame. But it's like nobody else is there. Like, just, it doesn't have popular support. But then you learn that there's hundreds of billions of dollars going to these so-called NGOs.
The Glenn Beck Program
Senate Republicans Just Caved on Cutting Inflation | Guest: Daniel Horowitz | 2/21/25
And it's your tax dollars that are funding things that are fundamentally anti-American. And they're propping up their narrative.
The Glenn Beck Program
Senate Republicans Just Caved on Cutting Inflation | Guest: Daniel Horowitz | 2/21/25
In fact, a massive amount of your tax dollars is going to legacy media companies. Yes. Directly from the government. The government wants to take over media. Yeah, it's terrible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I mean, I think there's also this, you know, like, do we actually have two parties? Do we have one party? Like the whole uniparty thing. Right. It's kind of true. So, I mean, my sort of rough guess is that while I think maybe three quarters of the graft is Democratic, I think there's like maybe 20, 25 percent that's Republican. So they've like basically most of the graft Democratic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, the size of it all, small decisions result in multi-billion dollar outcomes. So, you know, we'd see, you know, there was a case where we saw one person was getting $1.9 billion sent to their NGO, which basically got formed about a year ago and had no prior benefits. Really, no prior activity. So they just stand up an NGO. The whole NGO thing is a nightmare.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
is going to the Democrats, but they throw some bones to the Republicans too, so then they're in on it. It's not like the zero graph on the Republican side, to be clear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Plenty. Insider trading, and just there's the curious case of how do people in Congress or whatever become wealthy over time? Extremely wealthy. Yes. On a $170,000 a year salary. It's like literally impossible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. What is he doing? Correct. Yeah. And I think like the more accurate thing would be to say like, what is the family value increase? Meaning like- How much does their spouse earn? Do they have a mysteriously wealthy spouse?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, that's why I actually posted on X, like, I think maybe we should pay politicians more, frankly, because it reduces the forcing function for grafts. I think maybe we should either pay politicians nothing or maybe a lot more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's like somewhat maybe counterintuitively if politicians got paid a lot more, then they wouldn't feel like that there's so much of a forcing function for them to – except corrupt money.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But it's less of a forcing function. Yes. Well, let me put it this way. If you say somebody's got a, let's say they've got whatever, some kids in D.C., and it's an expensive place to live, the schools are terrible, so they need to send their kids to some kind of private schooling situation. They literally cannot afford that. They cannot afford that right now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So then you get into the situation, well, from their standpoint, well, they've got to... They'll say they're doing it for their family. They're doing it for their kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's more than just insider trading. The stock portfolio stuff is quite trackable, but it's a lot more than insider trading. The way they're acquiring wealth?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, this is really going to get me assassinated. It's like, I'm not lengthening my lifespan by explaining this stuff, to say the least. I mean, if I was supposed to go back to D.C., how am I going to survive? This poker is going to kill me for sure. So...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
In fact, I do think like there's – it's like I actually have to be careful that I don't push too hard on the corruption stuff because it's going to get me killed. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually thinking about that on the plane flight over here. It's like if I push too hard on the corruption stuff, people get desperate is the issue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Then they say like, okay, if the money flow cuts off, then okay, they can't afford school for their kids. Right. Then, then it's, then they're like, well, fuck you. I'm going to kill you for my kids type of thing. Yeah. You know, and I was like, oh, geez.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, totally. Well, see, this is what I think for that butler situation, for that assassin, it's kind of like that funny-looking sport curling, you know, where they have the stone on the ice, and then they throw the stone, and then there's someone that's brushing the ice, but you can't touch the stone. All you can do is just change the path of the stone a little bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And it's a misnomer because if you have a government-funded, non-governmental organization, you're simply a government-funded organization. It's an oxymoron.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But you keep brushing the ice and you can steer that stone right into the bullseye. That's what I think happened in Butler. That's what I think happened with that assassin. If you can find the trail of breadcrumbs, it's going to be like curling. Somebody was brushing the ice.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Just brush the ice. Yeah. If you're brushing the ice, eventually it's going to hit the bullseye.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
No, exactly. Exactly. I mean, they were suicide bombers. I mean, the Butler guy was a suicide assassin. The second guy that tried to kill him on the golf course was also a suicide assassin. From what I read, the Secret Service member that saw the gun pointing out fired several shots, none of which hit the assassin. But they could have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like if those shots had hit the second assassin, he would be dead too. So both of them... they were on a suicide mission, both of them. One actually got killed, one of them didn't get killed. But he could have been killed if the bullets had hit him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. Basically, the government-funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if they were the government but are somehow made legal if it's sent to a so-called non-profit. But these non-profits are then used to – people cash out these non-profits. They become very wealthy through non-profits. They pay themselves enormous sums through these non-profits.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There's a lot more about that guy than the first guy. I mean, you look at his background, he looks like, you know. Unhinged. Yeah, totally unhinged. Yeah. The first guy, there's no, I'm not aware of any evidence that shows that he's so unhinged as to be a suicide assassin. No. The second guy, like, okay, yeah, sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, like, basically, I'm like, listen. I get it. Attack the corruption enough to keep civilization trucking along, you know. Yeah. But I think if I fully destroy the corruption and the graft, they will kill me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. So I'm like, damn it. I really hope they don't kill you. Yeah. Thanks. Um, I mean, I strive, strive to be alive. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a real concern. Um, You know, I mean, there were two guys that, before I supported Trump and everything, there were two guys that traveled to Austin to kill me. I don't know if you know about this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. And two separate incidents. One guy thought I put a chip in his head. I mean they're both basically two guys that were just very much had severe mental illness. It wasn't like they had like a – I disagree with him politically and that's why he needs to die. This was pre – before I was – Before I got sort of smeared as being some sort of Nazi or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So before the propaganda wave, the severe propaganda wave, the probability that any given homicidal maniac is going to try to kill you is proportionate to how many times they hear your name. And so they heard my name a lot, so I just got to the top of the list of two homicidal maniacs who were arrested, and both were in Travis County Jail at the same time. Whoa.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I don't know if they talked or whatever, but they've both been released, by the way. Jesus Christ. They've both been released on bail, yeah. Right, but they got ankle monitors and stuff, but still.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, and the second guy had, like, chief serial killer in his bio on his ex profile. Yeah, it wasn't subtle is what I'm saying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. And at this point, I think I'm at the top of the list for a lot of homicidal maniacs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Which is they're making it sound like if you kill me, you're a hero. That's – what they're doing is evil.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Right. And it's like I'm the same person that I was a year ago. Nothing's changed, really. I didn't suddenly become a completely different human. But if you read the legacy mainstream media, their propaganda stream is that I am a completely different human. But I didn't get a brain transplant in a year. And let's say two years ago, I was a hero of the left. So how can I go from hero to villain
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
They even tried to demonize, in fact, at least partially successfully demonized Tim Irvin. who is a super rational, reasonable, great human. And his Wikipedia changed to far right. And he's like, far right? I'm like, what are you talking about? A few years ago, he was a liberal. So how do you go from liberal to instantly far right? And there's no left and right. There's only left and far right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Even far right. This is my left leg and this is my far right leg.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I think there's a total number of NGOs, probably millions. But in terms of large NGOs, tens of thousands. I mean it's actually – it's kind of a hack to the system where someone can get an NGO stood up for a fairly small amount of money. Like George Soros is really good at this. Like he really – George Soros is like a system hacker. Like he figured out how to hack the system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. That's totally crazy. Yeah. I mean, I'm like – I'm overall pro-vaccine, meaning like we think we should have some reasonable number of vaccines against major ailments. But I don't think we should be like jamming some little kid with like a giant vial that's like – Hepatitis B. Yeah, 20 different things at a time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's like it's going to overload your – it seems like there's a risk of overloading your immune system if you – I mean, there's like how many vaccines can you take at a time? It seems like your systems, there's like some risk of system overload here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, that's really the biggest thing is that – I mean, the news is not going to attack one of their biggest advertisers. Exactly. And they never do. Yes. At best, they're going to... They might like... They'll do something, but they're going to pull their punches. They're going to be like fake fighting. Yeah. Yeah. At best. Yes. Like movie fighting, but they're not actually landing haymakers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. Um, Yeah. I think AI actually could be very helpful with medical stuff. Because AI can look at all the studies and look at all the data, cross-check everything, and give you good recommendations. I mean, even as it is, like right now, you can upload your x-rays and your MRI images to Grok, and it'll give you a medical diagnosis.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And that diagnosis, from what I've seen, is at least as good as what, if not, I think. I've certainly seen cases where it's actually better than what doctors tell you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can literally take a photograph of your blood work, like the page, upload it from your phone, upload that to Grok, and it will tell you if it'll understand what all the data results are and tell you if there's something wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, yeah. Sometimes doctors, especially in high-rent offices, will sell you stuff you don't need. So I always like to be a little suspicious of a doctor that's got an office in Beverly Hills. Yeah. It's a high-rent situation. I'm not saying there are some very good doctors in Fairleigh Hills, but it's a high rent situation. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. And, I mean, one case, like, you know, I went to this doctor who was, like, highly recommended, you know, doctor to the stars, which is, like, maybe not a good sign. And I got, like, blood work done. You know, like, just drew blood and sent it to a lab. And the guy, I'm, like, sitting in his office, and he tells me that I'm, like, B12 deficient.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
He's a genius at arbitrage. I mean, these days he's pretty old, but a genius at arbitrage. So he figured out that you could leverage a small amount of money to create a nonprofit, then lobby the politicians to send a ton of money to that nonprofit so you can take what might be a $10 million donation to a nonprofit to create a nonprofit and leverage that into a billion-dollar NGO.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You know, it's certainly possible that I'm B12 deficient. And I was like, huh, okay. And then he gives me, it says, like, you have to take these, like, B12 supplements. And he's going to give me a starter pack. You know, and then it's going to be, like, $1,000 a month for these special B12. $1,000 a month for B12? Ridiculous amount of money, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah, it was like a whole bunch, B12 and a whole bunch of other vitamins. So then I get home. I'm paging through my blood work, and it says, according to the blood results, I have excess B12. So I'm like, wait a second. And he's giving me box pulls that have like 20,000% of recommended daily dose. Like 20,000% is a big number.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And I'm like, I said, look, I took a photograph of the blood work that says I have excess. I'm like above the range, above the recommended range of B12. And then I'm like – and I took a picture of the thing. It says – of the pills that say 20,000 percent.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's like can you help me reconcile these two things because it says I've got too much – a little too much B12 and you just gave me pills that have 20,000 percent more. I'm like this is crazy. What did the doctor say? He said you can never have too much B12. Oh, he's a B-12 junkie. I'm like, yes, you can.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. That guy's a B-12 addict. Yes, totally insane. That's what I'm saying. It's like, so, I mean, I could have just, so then, you know. Well, this was a while ago, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Now you can just photograph with your phone and upload it to Grok and Grok will tell you what's happening.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
just don't have it in sexy mode she'll keep trying to fuck you I mean you're asking for it in sexy mode you know literally you tapped on sexy mode yeah you're asking for it I mean I think we probably should like maybe allow it to get out of character a little bit sure yeah it's like an unhinged mode I try to get it back to being hinged but it would like no fucking way it's like I'm gonna stay unhinged how many modes do you have
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I was like, I don't know, like eight or something. And then there's an ability to have a custom mode. So then you can have unhinged sexy. Ooh.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But that's exactly what a Nazi would say. Damn it. Yeah, that's what an alien would say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's not because it's logical. I mean, what's relevant about Nazis is like, are you like invading Poland? Right. And if you're not like invading Poland, Maybe you're not. You have to be committing genocide and starting wars. What is bad about Nazis? It wasn't their fashion sense or their mannerisms. It was the Holocaust. The war and genocide is the bad part.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And what about all these so-called Proud Boy rallies or whatever? And it's like, they always got masks and they always got the same uniforms. And for some reason, they never get doxxed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
A nonprofit is a weird word. It's just a non-governmental organization. And then you can – the government continues to fund that every year. And it will have a nice sounding name like the Institute for Peace or something like that. But really it's a graft machine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, I do think like one argument for me staying alive is that it's more entertaining if I'm alive than if I'm dead. Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. But I could be alive and injured, which would suck. Right. Like the wing just shoot my arm off or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
What do they have to do? Just really no requirements at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I think a lot of people in the government know that they're not doing good work, but it's a giant graph machine. I mean, people online are like unpacking this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. But doesn't it do some good as well? No, it does some good. So it's not like 0% good. If it was really 0% good, it would be much easier to attack. So there's going to be some percent good that they add in there. But it might be 5% or 10% good, but 90%, 95% not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean we have continued to fund things that appear to be legitimate even with the flimsiest – if there's even the flimsiest excuse. Like I just say like send me a picture of the thing. Like you could literally have AI generate the picture. But if you're not even willing to try to trick me … then we're not going to send the money, okay?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, there was work for Ebola prevention. I actually don't know if this work is even effective. It may or may not be. It could be the kind of thing where you sort of fund Ebola prevention, but it turns out that actually you're funding a lab that develops new Ebola recipes or something, you know? And they claim it's Ebola prevention, but it's actually Ebola creation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So some of these things, I don't know. But it just seems like we shouldn't be sending taxpayer money to dubious enterprises overseas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Well, also, we just have a real issue with the budget deficit. It's gigantic. All things being equal, if we didn't have a gigantic budget deficit where the interest on the national debt exceeds the Defense Department budget, which is truly astounding. So we're paying over a trillion dollars of interest on the national debt. then, okay, we would have more room for wasting money basically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You're clearly a genius. I said, what is in Fort Knox? You know the gold and all?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But when we're spending so much money that the country is going bankrupt, then we really need to stop spending money unless we're sure it is good value.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, most of the time I create businesses from scratch. Twitter was a case where I kind of bought a company that was – I kind of knew it was a hairball.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
No, Tesla did not exist in any meaningful form. There were no employees. JV's Travel or Not joined three other people. There was no car. There was no nothing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, we started off with about 40 people, maybe 100 people. And we're really just going through doing very basic things here. As bad as Twitter was, the federal government is much worse. So... In the case of Twitter, it wasn't a profitable company. It was basically a break-even company, but at least it was break-even, and it had to pass an audit. The federal government is not break-even.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's literally losing $2 trillion a year, and it does not pass its audits. It fails its own audits. There was a case where... I think Senator Collins was telling me about how she gave the Navy $12 billion for more submarines, got no extra submarines, and then held a hearing to say where the $12 billion go. And they were like, we don't know. That was it. I mean, basically, this stuff is so crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's like only the federal government could get away with this level of waste. It's mostly waste. It's mostly not fraud. It's mostly waste. It's mostly just ridiculous things happening. Because they've been able to do it this way for so long.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, it's like Milton Friedman said, like, money is most poorly spent when you're spending someone else's money on people you don't know. How much are you going to care?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And that's the federal government. So they're spending someone else's money on people they don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, the people receiving the money want to keep receiving the money.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah, clearly. Yes. So, but, you know, I mean, the reason I'm, The reason I'm putting so much effort into this is that I think it is a very dire situation. It's not optional, basically. America's going bankrupt, so that just can't happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. We found just with a basic search of the social security database that there were 20 million dead people mocked as alive. But were they getting money? Some of them were getting money. What percentage of them? It isn't clear. We're actually trying to run this around. I was trying to get an answer right before the show.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
What it looks like is that most of the fraud is not coming from Social Security payments directly, but because they're marked as alive in the Social Security database that they can then get disability, unemployment, sort of fake medical payments, and other things because they're marked as alive in the Social Security database. So it looks like the fraud is a bank shot, essentially.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
The bank shot into Social Security. They just do an are you alive check and then get fraudulent payments from every other part of the government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. And this exploits – the fundamental weakness in the government is that the various government databases, they don't talk to each other. Or they talk to each other very poorly in a very limited way. So the way the system gets exploited is by taking advantage of the poor communication between the various databases in the government. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
To give you an example of what's happening in, say, Treasury, which is improving rapidly, the main payments computer is called PAM, like Payment Accounts Master Database or something like that, but everyone calls it PAM. That's responsible for almost $5 trillion of payments a year, roughly $1 billion an hour. And when we came there, we're looking at the payment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's like the payments have no – you could put a payment through with no payment categorization code and no description on the payment, like basically untraceable blank checks. This is the kind of thing that if it was done as a public company, the company would be immediately delisted and the executive team would be thrown in prison. But this is just normal at the government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So we said, okay, our recommendation to the Treasury and the Federal Reserve is like we need to make the payment categorization codes mandatory, not optional, and there needs to be an – An explanation. We're not judging the quality of the explanation, but there should be some explanation for what this payment is for above nothing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
That's a radical change to the system that is being implemented now. My guess is that probably saves $100 billion a year. Jesus Christ. Where was that money going? Rough order of magnitude.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, so this is where you get into the sort of gray boundary between waste and fraud. If money is sent to a person or organization from the government and you didn't really deserve it, but the government still sent it to you, is that waste or fraud?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of payments that where someone just approved the payment, but then that payment officer changed jobs or retired or died. And the payments just keep going. It's like if you forget to pay your gym membership or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Now, imagine it's not the gym membership. You said your gym membership is $20 billion a year or something. But they forgot to turn it off. That's happening at scale in the government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's totally nuts is what I'm saying. That's so insane. Yes, it's totally insane. What did you expect when you went in? Did you expect it would be like this? I thought it would be bad, but I did not think it would be as bad as this. I mean, look, the good news is that it's a target-rich environment for saving money. It's not like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
If it was a very well-run ship, if it was very efficient, it would be hard to improve. But it's not efficient, so therefore it is actually relatively easy to improve. Let's just say it's not rocket science. You know, I know rocket science. So... It's a lot of mundane things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And some of the things are like so crazy that we didn't even know to ask about that because we just assumed like, you know, payments out of the treasury computer would have a payment categorization code and it would have some explanatory note saying what the payment's for. The idea that it would be just untraceable blank checks didn't occur to us at first. Jesus. So anyway, just.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
They don't know. I think that's probably a cumulative number. Yes. So, yeah. But, yeah, if you add up, it's. Do you remember that story, Jamie? Yeah. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Because it needs to talk shit and give you answers. Right. Totally agree. It's got to balance that out. It's got to mix it in there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I mean, how do you know? Obviously, one cannot say it was spent legitimately if they don't know what it was spent on. That doesn't make any sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, this is a revolutionary cabinet and maybe the most revolutionary cabinet since the first revolution. This is not a bunch of business as usual. So this is why some of the standard confirmations are quite challenging is because when you try to appoint people who are going to change the system, the system doesn't want to let them through.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, because we're cutting off their graph machine. So that's what they're upset about. That's the real thing they're upset about. And if you want to know what Doge is cutting, and I want to be clear, these are cuts that Doge recommends to the department. And usually these recommendations are followed, but these are recommendations that are then confirmed by the department.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You can see line by line what Doge has done at doge.gov. So whatever we do, we put on Doge.gov so you can see everything that is being done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. And you can look at each line item. And, you know, a bunch of these sort of fallout shows will say, like, oh, it's a constitutional crisis, blah, blah, blah. But what they won't do is point out which payments are wrong. Right. So my challenge to them is point out which payments are wrong. Yeah, go through it. Which of these sort of waste slash fraud things are wrong? Which line?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You're hearing anecdotal stories about mothers starving. But we can name the specifics. Yeah. Line by line. We got the receipts. And here's the other thing. We post the receipts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. So, exactly. Because we're saying, like, look, in fact, I've said we're going to make mistakes. We're not going to be perfect. So, if we make a mistake, we'll quickly fix it. So, we need to act fast to stop wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. But if we make a mistake, we'll reverse it quickly. Right. You know, so...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. As it is, there are tens of thousands of federal employees that have access already to the system. Anyone from Doge has to go through the same vetting process that those federal employees went through. So it's not like some unvetted random situation. If, for example, there's a security clearance needed, the Doge person has to have that same security clearance. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So there's no reduction in security. But, I mean, obviously the vast numbers of social security numbers have leaked onto the Internet. People have hacked the government systems multiple times. Vast amounts of public information has been hacked and dumped onto the Internet. So there's a guy at the IRS that leaked half a million tax returns. just a few years ago. On purpose? Yeah. For what reason?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It doesn't need to bring it down. It's bringing itself down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
He wanted to, I think he was trying to get at Trump and maybe me and a few others. But he stole like 500,000 tax returns. Like not a few, like it's a lot of tax returns. Jesus Christ. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, well, that's the only thing they can say, but they can't point to the line item.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And so they can't say like, well, this is the thing where, you know, the nutrients for pregnant mothers were stopped. They can't point to that because we didn't. Right. It's a lie.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's, there's kind of, I think it makes sense because he's just talking about the things, not the sort of, he's just talking about the opinions. Opinion pieces. The opinion pieces. Yeah. So the regular journalism stays the same. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. The whole thing is very crazy. I mean, the media is incredibly partisan. I mean, they're not – I mean, they take – almost all the media is – you're left shifted. It's kind of weird.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
If you talk to somebody who gets all their information from what I call legacy media, they're living in a different world than if they, say, are listening to your podcast or are getting news from X. It's kind of wild. It is very wild. It's like they're living in an ultimate reality.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like the Associated Press, which I call Associated Propaganda, the AP, they ran an international news story saying that Doge fired air traffic controllers. But we didn't fire any air traffic controllers at all. In fact, we're trying to hire air traffic controllers, not fire them. Yeah, I saw that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I don't know. But like if you – like let's say if somebody posts – if somebody puts up like a two-hour long video, that's not a tweet. Right. It's a post. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So – But I don't know if people still want to call it a tweet or whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. So a lot of really qualified air traffic controllers were pushed out because of DEI stuff. So, I mean, not to be blunt, I mean, a bunch of really good, talented old white guys were pushed out. It's not cool. And so there's a talent shortage in air traffic control because of DEI and not hiring people on merit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I think we should not put the public safety at risk because of some demented philosophy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It was like 400 people or something, and some sex chat room with some extremely demanded stuff. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Who's supposed to, like, spy on, you know, like, if, like, it's a national threat or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, a work environment should be a professional environment where, you know, they're getting the job done that they're, you know, being paid to do. Of course. It's obviously not supposed to be sort of getting paid for bizarre sexcapades.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's a serious case of no one's being arrested-o-phobia, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You probably have whatever you want. You can have a cat girl if you want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, I think I've got probably the same information that I mean, I'm just reading What's the latest thing on the X, you know, I'm just looking at my feed and I'm like, yeah, you know, it's a real page-turner And like I thought we're gonna get some revelations today I was like big binders full of stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
No, it's all old stuff from 2015 and 2021. Okay, what the fuck is going on? But then apparently they discovered a whole bunch of stuff at the Southern District of New York. Right. So that's – and I'm like – and I think Pam Bondi is actually great and Cash Patel are great, but they just got there. Right. So then they're in a – they just got there, but they're in a hostile environment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
They're not in a friendly environment. Right. So it's like if you suddenly got put in – captain of a ship, but the crew was previously your enemy. Right. The entire crew was previously your enemy. Right. You know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, the crew doesn't want to give you the evidence because the crew is your enemy. They were like your mortal enemies just a moment ago. You just got there. Yeah. So I think we've got to give, you know, the Attorney General and, you know, new director of the FBI a little bit of slack here because they literally just got there. I think so too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
If there's conspiracy evidence, someone's going to send it to you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Someone's going to send you the stuff. Yeah. So it hasn't been released yet. There's no way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You got to get your own. Don't they have sex with their tails or something?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I haven't seen it, so... Cash Patel has. He has? He said he's seen it all. Yeah. He just posted to his, like, ex-account or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
What about the storm? I am the storm. I mean, what channels? Here's the channel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. Just getting anything done. Like I said, you just joined as captain of a ship where the crew hates your guts. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. They were your enemy. They're strongly opposed to anything you want to do. Yeah. And you're trying to give them orders. And you're trying to expose them. Yeah, they don't want to be exposed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, I was reading on X that, like, Comey's daughter is, like, the lead prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Did you read that? Yes. And, like, so obviously there's a bit of an entanglement there. A little bit. Like, what if there's something that, you know, puts her dad in a bad light? What?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I just want to know about Fort Knox, and it won't leave me alone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, why don't we just data dump the files? Just go in there, take photos of all the papers, presumably paper, and just post it online. And let the chips fall where they may.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Is it in some filing cabinet somewhere? I don't know. Right. Where is it? Where's the magic filing cabinet?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So I think part of it is like, you know, like, let's say you were made director of the FBI.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I might be able to. Yeah, that's what's crazy. Like, literally, you go there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, Dan's hardcore. If it's reasonably findable, I think he's going to find it. Between him and Cash, I think they're going to get stuff out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like an FBI computer where you type in the search? That's what I want to know. I'm just like with the basic mechanism here. It's either in a filing cabinet on paper where it's like, Maybe there's progressive levels of security. You're like, open this door. Do you have the pass for this level? You get a level unlocked, and there's a level unlocked. You get in there, and there's an old Acer laptop.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah, there's an old unplugged laptop. You've got to only plug it in. It's in a skiff. Yeah, this is why I think a tour of Fort Knox would be awesome. Like a live tour of Fort Knox. We can actually see. It's like, is the gold there or not? They say it is. Is it real? Or did somebody spray paint some lead? Imagine if it's not. Imagine if it's not all there. Like some of it's missing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I believe the last formal audit was in the 50s. So I'm like, okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Absolutely. I just want to emphasize the sheer madness of the government. Because they have magic money computers, the checks never bounce for the federal government. So you don't have the normal corrective mechanism that you'd have for a company or for an individual. The check's just always clear. The net result is inflation, which is effectively a tax on everyone. But...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like the Defense Department hasn't passed an audit in I don't know how many years. Seven years. Yeah. I mean, exactly. So it's like you have to be frigging Chuck Norris. Only Chuck Norris can get the Defense Department to pass an audit type of thing. That's the level of skill you need.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Exactly. So, you know, the Pentagon will like – like their accounting error, like the stuff that they lose in the couch cushions is like $20, $30 billion a year. They don't know where it went. It's gone. Way to go. And it's gone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
That's why I say even simple things like just requiring that outgoing payments for the treasury computer have a payment code and a comment of what the payment is about and someone to call about the payment I think will have a very powerful effect in stopping wasteful outflows and stopping fraud.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like, hopefully the biggest scam of all time ever. Of human history. Of human history, yes. Wow. Wow. I think you're right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like it's probably a trillion dollar scam. There's never been a trillion dollar scam, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
No. This is the most absurd outcome I can possibly imagine, actually. Also, Doge started as sort of a meme coin. It was like a joke cryptocurrency involving memes and dogs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Well, actually, I was originally going to call it the Government Efficiency Commission, which is a very boring name. And then people online were like, no, it needs to be the Department of Government Efficiency. And I was like, you know what? You're right. Of course. Of course.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like the sheriff's service. Like our mascot is a cute dog.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's like a casino or something. I don't know. Yeah, it's totally gambling. And people just do whatever, greater fool theory and musical chairs and whoever's the last to sit down loses type of thing. And somehow or another, it's still legal. I think not too many people – I mean it's sort of like you go to the casino. If you expect to win at the casino, you're being a fool. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So I think if you expect to win at meme coins, you're being foolish. Yeah. You're not going to win at meme coins. Don't sink your life savings into a meme coin. No, but you can gamble a little and you can ride waves and win a little and lose a little. If you want to have some fun, then play with meme coins.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Good. Can you tell me about Avatar depression? Like if you've seen the movie Avatar, but you can't live there, so you get sad?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
At the risk of saying something bold and outrageous, don't bet the farm on a meme coin.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, casinos are legal. Yeah. It is like a casino. And people just lose money at casinos. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, the government's one big pyramid scheme if you ask me. Yeah, well, you could tell me better than anybody. Social security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. Right, explain that. Oh, so, well, people pay into Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately. But the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So you're paying, like if you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far. Have you ever looked at the debt clock? Yes. Okay. There's our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of the future obligations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So basically, people are living way longer than expected. And there are fewer babies being born. So you have more people who are retired that live for a long time and get retirement payments. So the future obligation. So however bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it will be much worse in the future at the risk of being a buzzkill here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Did you see... So we better fix what we've got right now, because if it's bad now, it's going to be much worse in the future.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There's so many whistles being blown. It's hard to keep track. A lot of whistles.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. Not just Social Security, but disability, which is even more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So if I were to say, what's at the heart of... Why is the Democrat propaganda machine so fired up to destroy me? That's the main reason. The main reason is that entitlements fraud, that includes like Social Security, disability, Medicaid, entitlements fraud for illegal aliens is what is serving as a gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like basically, if you pay people at a standard of living that is above 90% of earth, then you have a very powerful economy. incentive for 90% of Earth to come here and to stay here. But if you end the illegal alien fraud, then you turn off that magnet and they leave. And they stop coming and the ones that are here, many of them will simply leave.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And if that happens, they will lose a massive number of Democratic voters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Correct. Which they were trying to do. They're already turning them. So in New York State, illegal aliens can already vote in state and city elections. A lot of people don't know that. I mean, they're trying to fight that. They're trying to stop that. But currently, I think it's like 600,000 are registered to vote, illegal aliens, in New York. That is wild. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at, say,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
FEMA, the agency that was paying for illegal aliens to stay at luxury hotels in New York was FEMA. That's an agency that's meant to support Americans in distress from natural disasters, was paying for luxury hotels for illegals in New York. It's true.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There's a fact. Fact. They're literally – like when we stopped that payment, we stopped all those money because that's obviously an insane way to spend taxpayer money. New York sued the government, sued the federal government to get the money. So you could just look at their lawsuit. They were sending that money even after President Trump signed an executive order saying it needs to stop.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I thought the movie had some good special effects, but I did not want to live on the planet. And this is coming from a guy who wants to go to Mars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
They still press send on $80 million to luxury hotels in New York. Your tax money went to pay for illegal aliens in luxury hotels in New York from an agency that is meant to help Americans in distress from natural disasters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes, exactly. What's actually happening is they're buying voters. That's really what's happening. It's like a giant voter fraud scam. They're importing voters, and it's really just a matter of time. A lot of people have trouble believing this, but the more you look at it, the more you will realize just how much of a problem this is. It's not just real. It is real.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It is an attempt to destroy democracy in America. That's what, in my view, it is what it really is. Like if you take the sort of seven swing states, like often the margin of victory there is like maybe 20,000 votes. If you put 200,000 illegals in there and they have like a 80% likelihood of voting down and it's only a matter of time before they become citizens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
then those swing states will not be swing states in the future. And if they are not swing states, we'll be a permanent one-party state country. Permanent deep blue socialist state. That's what America will become.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
That was the game plan. That is still the game plan. And so they almost succeeded. If the machine of which the Kamala puppet was the representation had won, that's what would have happened. The reason I went so hardcore for Trump was because, to me, this was a fork in the road, like a very obvious fork in the road.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states... not swing states. They would be blue states. Then they would win the House, the Senate, and the presidency. They would then make DC into a state Maybe Puerto Rico. Get four extra senators. Pack the Supreme Court.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I guess there are sort of square things on Earth. You know, the planet's a big place, so eventually it's going to be pretty square. No, it's alien civilizations, of course. That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what is it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So then you'll have the House, Judiciary, Senate, and Presidency all blue. And then they will keep importing more illegals to cement that outcome. Basically what happened in California.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It would have been the end. That's why I went so hardcore for Trump. It was otherwise been the end. And that's why the Democrat machine is so intent on destroying me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, I invite people to do their research. The more they do their research, the more they will see that what I'm saying is absolutely true. Just do the research.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, I think these things are actually, it's easy to understand if you look at basic incentives. The basic incentive here is the more illegals that the Democrats can bring in, the more likely they are to win. So that's what they're going to do. That's what they have been doing. And it worked in California. California supermajority dam.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And look at all the companies that are leaving California. I mean, In-N-Out just announced they're leaving. Their headquarters is leaving California.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So... And California made healthcare free for illegals as of last year. And obviously that's a gigantic magnet for more illegals. And this is not a thing you can solve simply with money because what happens is you simply have more patients than a doctor can possibly see. And you can't just make doctors out of nothing. So sometimes people are like, oh, it's just a money thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
No, it takes a long time for somebody to become a doctor, 30 years. And so what actually happens in California is that there are too many patients for the doctors to see. So then the average citizen in California suffers as a result. Now, the elite in California are fine because they have private doctors. They can just pay for the best doctors.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So the elite in California are doing fine, but your average citizen in California is not doing fine. And the tax burden for healthcare for illegals was supposed to be $3 billion. I think they now estimate it's $9 billion. But that number will scale to infinity, basically. It's like Why not? Why not? If you need any operation at all, come to California and have it be free.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. This is why the Dems will not even deport criminals. Yeah. Because every criminal deported is a lost vote. So even if somebody is illegal with a criminal record and commits crime in America, they still were not being deported.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. California and New York, you are not allowed to show your ID when you vote. I just want to be clear so everyone understands this. In California and New York, you are not allowed to show your ID even if you want to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
If you're trying to facilitate fraud in elections, it's a great idea. That's the only reason.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's for fraud. It's like, wake up, sheeple. Wake up. Hello. Let's say you wanted to commit fraud. What are the things you would do? You would say, you don't need ID, and you can mail in your ballot. And we'll give you free health care.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, in this case, it being on fire is not just a metaphor in California. It's just like, goddamn...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Right to the rocks. Bang. Crash the boat. I mean, there's a guy who posts on X who's great, God Saad. Yeah, he's a friend of mine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, he's awesome. Yeah, he's great. And he talks about basically suicidal empathy. There's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. Yeah. So we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. I believe in empathy. I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be... programmed like a robot. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. It's weaponized empathy is the issue. Yeah. Weaponized empathy. And yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Almost completely. It's borderline illegal to be a Republican in California. In San Francisco or L.A., it's borderline illegal to be a Republican.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
No, look. In San Francisco, you could shoot heroin while taking a dump on the mayor's car in front of City Hall. And nothing would happen to you. But if you walk down the street with a MAGA hat, you're going to get attacked. Right. It's insane.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, I sort of can trace it to when did the gun emoji get nerfed? When did it turn into a squirt gun? That was a couple of years ago. That was like 2016, I think. Was it? Yeah. Yeah, it became a squirt gun. Can you bring it back to X? Yeah, no, no. If you use a gun emoji on X, Apple will insist that it be a squirt gun, and then the X app turns it back into a 1911 gun. Oh, really? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, my view is we should move to Mars. Well, not move to Mars. We should have a second planet to preserve civilization. Right. Because let's say hypothetically, I mean, maybe those are the ruins of a long dead civilization. That will probably happen to Earth at some point. You know, it's a matter of time before we get hit by an asteroid or maybe we annihilate ourselves with...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Oh, that's great. So you can actually have a 1911 gun. We reverted the Apple change inside the app.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, I like that meme where it's like the people telling you that what you're hearing is disinformation are the same people that did the pregnant man emoji. Yes. Yeah. Think about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yo, this is a dude with a strong jawline. Yeah, he's wearing woman face. This is a buff dude.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, come on. That's not a woman. Yeah. And they're like saying, watch out for disinformation. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's so crazy. This is bullshit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. Any questioning of it would result in being ostracized.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And probably accelerating. I mean, my account would have been suspended long ago. For sure. Yeah, for sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Uh, I mean, I'm just trying to keep civilization going here, you know, for longer. Um, so, um, I think we at least want to build a city on Mars, um, and become a multi-planet civilization, um, which I think would be incredibly important in ensuring the long-term survival of civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Actually, probably four weeks. They were supposed to be up there for like eight days. Yeah. And they've been up there for like eight months. So a little longer than expected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, if long you stay up there, you get, you know, sort of in zero G, you get increased bone loss. So it ended up being like this political football and sort of hotly contested topic. We offered to bring them back early. This offer was rejected by the Biden administration.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
What do you think they would have done if they had won? How would they get those people back? No, they can only get them back with a SpaceX spacecraft. But they pushed the return date past the inauguration date.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Nuclear war. Or super volcanoes. Or super volcanoes, exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There isn't anyone else to do it. NASA can't get them. The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is the only one that is considered safe enough to bring them back. So NASA concluded that the Boeing spacecraft was not safe. So that's why they're stuck there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. But they would obviously treat it as a propaganda victory and charge crazy money.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. So, well, there were also the Biden administration was also suing SpaceX. They had this massive lawsuit against SpaceX for SpaceX not hiring asylum seekers. Right. So people like say like, oh, Elon's making it up. The Biden administration wasn't against SpaceX. I'm like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Bro, the Department of Justice had a massive lawsuit against SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers, even though it is illegal for us to hire anyone who is not a permanent resident. So there's law that says you have to hire asylum seekers, but there's also a law that says anyone hired by a rocket company, which is an advanced weapons technology, must be a permanent resident.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
An asylum seeker is not a permanent resident. So it is both legal and illegal to hire asylum seekers. So why would the Biden administration launch a massive lawsuit? Again, this is public information. It's not like my imagination. Why would they launch such a massive lawsuit against SpaceX? They're extremely antagonistic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There's in fact, there's, International traffic and arms regulations is like a law that is there to ensure that only permanent residents of the United States can work at advanced weapons companies. Rockets are advanced weapons. So the same is true if it's nuclear or some bioweapon thing or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Obviously, if someone were to work its basics and then go leave and go to North Korea or Iran, they could build missile technology that could destroy the United States. So that's why you're not allowed to hire people who are permanent residents. It's logical. Logical. Logical.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Right. That lawsuit was funded by Reid Hoffman, who is a major damn donor. And also an Epstein client. The plot thickens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. Known Epstein clients who are obviously extremely powerful, powerful politically and very wealthy are Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Reid Hoffman. And some others too, but those three. So, you know, why was Reid Hoffman so intent on destroying Trump? You think it's because they're worried about the list coming out? Yeah, one of the reasons. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So... I mean, I'm like, this is, you know, yeah, so... It's so frustrating to be sitting in a situation where the list isn't coming out. Well, it better come out, I mean, hopefully tomorrow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Uh... Like I said, the tough thing that they've got is they've been made captain of a ship with a hostile crew. So it's not like you have magical powers. You get made captain of a ship with a hostile crew, you still have a hostile crew. You've got to bring in people who are going to be helpful as opposed to obstructionist. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But yeah, I think the public will be rightly frustrated if no one is prosecuted for the Epstein-Klein list, no one at all. At least, I don't know, the top five or something? Some number. There should at least be an attempted prosecution of the worst offenders.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, a bunch of these things are not like it's, it's common knowledge, but we just, we don't actually have the proof. Right. Um, so the proof is there. I mean, there's lots of videos. Um, Yeah. I mean, the dude is like a mountain of... Whenever they raided Epstein's place, there would have been like a mountain of evidence. Where is that mountain?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. Like, who took possession of the evidence? Yeah. Specifically. Right. The individuals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Well... Yeah. Yeah. You know, what we need are people who are really good with computers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Uh, I mean, SpaceX, um, you know, my company, SpaceX, has the most advanced rocket technology in the world. I think I'd know. Right. And to the best of my knowledge, there is not any magic, there's not like some super advanced propulsion technology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, there's nothing even that I'm aware of that works in theory. It's not like I don't... I would like this to exist, to be clear. I would like this to exist. And I have the... From a security clearance standpoint, I have top, top secret. I have equivalent of like an all-access pass from a security clearance standpoint. So... I don't think they're hiding it from me, basically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, I know these weapons manufacturing companies, like Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop. I mean, yeah, they do some interesting things, but there's no breakthrough that they have. I'm confident they do not have a breakthrough. Why don't they just compete with SpaceX and make a better rocket? Why are they holding back on making a lot of money from beating SpaceX with better rockets?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I want cool things to exist. Right. Do I want UFOs to exist? Yes, I want UFOs to exist because that would be really interesting. Of course, everybody does. It would be cool. It's a more boring world where UFOs don't exist. Or like advanced propulsion stuff doesn't exist. If it doesn't exist, that's more boring. I'd like it to be more interesting. If it did exist, I'd like it to exist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I hope we find something. But I have not seen... Like, SpaceX launches 90% of all satellite mass to orbit. So if you take all of Earth's rocket launches, my company has a 90% market share of Earth. China does about 5%, and the rest of the world does, including the Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, and everyone, does 5%. So... Why wouldn't they use this to defeat SpaceX?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Sure. I mean, can we does anyone have a high risk video or photo of this thing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, there's like somebody did a curve of like the resolution of UFOs and the resolution of cameras. to move the UFO resolution of the state flat despite megapixels and cameras going like, you know, super high.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
That's what I've been looking for. You could ask our Grok AI right now to create a high-res image of an alien spacecraft over Austin. Yeah. And it's going to do a great job. So why would we not have at least that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, there have been like multiple times where the Air Force and Navy has called SpaceX and said they think they've seen aliens. And we're like, was it at this time on this date in this location? They're like, yes. How do you know? That's us. There's been a lot of that. That's our satellites. Those are our satellites. And they're like, no, they're not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And they are moving at, you know, 16,000 miles an hour. So it's pretty fast. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It does look awesome. I mean, they're not stealthy against any advanced radar system, by the way. It doesn't work. It doesn't work anymore? It doesn't work, no. Was it old school stuff? They're only stealthy against old radars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
They're working on a new one right now. They didn't shut them down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, you can still see them. They're not invisible. Right. They're not like, oh, it's not like a cloaking device from Star Trek.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's because I'm an alien. There's time you need. I thought about it. I'm an alien, and I keep telling people I'm an alien, but they don't believe me. I believe you. Okay, thank you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Um, well, I mean, the fundamental breakthrough we're aiming for at SpaceX is a fully and rapidly reusable orbital rocket where both stages are fully and rapidly reusable. With our Falcon rocket, we are able to reuse the main stage and the nose cone, but we're not able to reuse the upper stage. And it still takes us at least a few days from when the main stage lands to when we can fly it again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's not fully reusable because we lose the upper stage, which costs $10 million to build. And then the main stage, it's not as reusable as an aircraft. You can't just refuel it and fly. It requires work for a couple of days. But the Starship design is the first design that is capable of full and rapid reusability, where that is one of the possible outcomes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And once you have full and rapid reusability, the cost of access to space drops by a factor of 100. It's like 100 times cheaper. By some metrics, it's 1,000 times cheaper. And... And then when you factor in orbital refilling, so you refill on orbit, it can drop the cost per ton to the surface of Mars by a factor of 10,000. Whoa. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well... There's some... Like, we're pretty close to being able to rapidly reuse the booster for Starship. That's why, you know, it comes back and gets caught by the arms, and then the arms place it back in the launch mount. So... Now, this whole, you know... We have a little bit of engine damage. We got a little bit of heat shield damage. There's...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There's tweaks that are needed, but we're pretty close to achieving full and rapid reusability of the booster. I think we'll achieve reusability of the ship this year, and I think we'll achieve rapid reusability of the whole stack ship and booster next year. This is the fundamental breakthrough required for life to become multi-planetary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
On the shift side, the toughest problem is the heat shield. No one has ever developed a fully reusable orbital heat shield. Because when you come in from orbital velocity, you come in like a flaming meteor, like you're just a raging ball of fire. And it's hard to have a heat shield that doesn't partially melt or get destroyed in that process.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I think we should stop trying to genetically engineer super viruses. It's insane.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You know, that wasn't a problem we were able to solve with Falcon 9. That's why the upper stage burns up on reentry. Okay. With Starship, the ship portion, you've got the booster and you've got the ship. We've got to solve making a fully reusable orbital heat shield, a problem that has never been solved before. For a while there, I was like, I'm not sure this is solvable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
At this point, I think it is solvable. It requires detailed iteration on the heat shield tiles. I mean, we vertically integrated the manufacturing of the heat shield tiles because there was no supplier that could provide us with the materials that were needed. So the... You need to make essentially this very fine vermicelli of glass and aluminum oxide fibers. Aluminum oxide is basically sapphire.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So it's like glass and sapphire, very fine fibers in exactly the right geometry with special coatings. in order to have the heat shield tile be reusable, like not melt, but not be so brittle that it gets damaged on ascent or descent. Like it can't be as, you know, it's kind of like almost the brittleness of a coffee cup type of thing. And the rocket's shaking like hell.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So you got this thing like, you saw it firsthand. Like imagine you're at ground zero of that rocket. Like you feel how much shaking it was when you're like five miles away. Imagine if you're right there, you know. So you're shaking these things that are like as brittle as a coffee cup, trying not to have them crack or break. and then not have them melt. You've got several thousand of these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. Yes. That's a very difficult problem. It's a problem no one has ever solved. So we've got to get the exact right materials combination, the right molecules in the right shape, and then apply that heat shield perfectly to the rocket with no mistakes. There's a reason that no one solved this before. It's a very difficult problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So like I said, we had to vertically integrate the entire manufacturing of the tile from basic raw materials to a finished tile. Like build the entire supply chain from basic raw materials. So you're just inputting silicon and aluminum oxides
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I mean, the Space Shuttle, like Space Shuttle Leading Edge used – like quite dense carbon-carbon tiles. They're like basically thick and heavy, but also subject to cracking. That's like what happens. The foam broke off and it hit the tile, cracked the tile. Then on entry, the tiles that had been cracked or broken weren't able to shield the shuttle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And so the plasma got in and melted the primary structure and the whole space shuttle broke apart. Yeah. So you basically can't have something that's as brittle, you know, brittle like the space shuttle. This footage of that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And rain debris over the whole United States. Yeah. And they got almost all the pieces. The...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
The full technical explanation would, I think, be understood by about six people listening to this. There was a lot of brilliant engineering in the space shuttle tiles, and a bunch of the heat shielding wasn't even tiles. It was actually silica blankets, like felt blankets, essentially. If you look closely, you'll see they're actually heat blankets, not tiles in some areas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But they would have cracked tiles, and occasionally the tiles would fall off. There were a few close calls where tiles fell off, but they weren't in a super vulnerable position on the space shuttle. But it would take them several months, like eight, nine months, to refurbish a space shuttle between each flight. So it was not reusable at all. Really. And it certainly wasn't rapid. So...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like I said, a very hard problem. You've also got to sort of attach the tiles in a way that enables the structure underneath to move, to expand and contract, even though you've got these very rigid tiles. So...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
like the the main that the tanks which take on cryogenic propellant will contract when you put in the cryogenic propellant but then when you come in and you get very hot they will expand so now you're expanding the you're contracting and expanding the gap between these rigid tiles but how much It varies depending on where you are on the vehicle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So if you're in the cryogenic tank section, I mean, you can see like a 10%, 20% difference in the gap. Really? It's pretty significant, yeah. It's enough that you can't just put all the tile. You can't just jam the tiles together. If you actually butted them up, they would all crack. Because there's too much movement. There's also some amount of body bending.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So as the ship is ascending, when the engines steer, there's a little bit of movement. So if the tiles are too close together, they'll essentially just crack and snap. You have to have a gap. Like how planes – Yeah, like a plane wing will move. A plane body will move too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You have to have some gap, but if you have too much of a gap, then the heat gets past the tile and melts the structure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, they're not all exactly the same size, but yeah, we have sort of a hexagonal tile.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, there's no 3D printer that's – I mean the biggest ones are like maybe three feet. There's no – you can't 3D print it. You have to have something that can move. Right. Uh, it has to be able to flex, to flex. Um, like, so you've got expansion and contraction. Um, you're, you're really dry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like you're, you know, you're, um, you're putting in liquid oxygen, which is like minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Um, Actually, we sub-cool it to minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's very cold. And then it will be several hundred degrees, maybe 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit potentially on reentry. So you get this huge temperature swing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. But it was obviously meant in the most positive spirit possible. Yes. Yeah. Obviously. Obviously.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So the thermal expansion is substantial and the whole – and you're – thermal expansion and contraction combined with body bending. So you have to take the worst case body bending and thermal expansion contraction. This is a very hard problem. Yeah. Yeah. Delicate balance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. What would be really helpful is for us to get the ship back so we can study – where we had cracked tiles or lost tiles. Why did we have a cracked or lost tiles? It was because maybe the tiles were, the gap was too big, too small. Maybe there was a height difference between the tiles. Maybe we need to change the chemical composition.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
If we can get the dam ship back intact, we can iterate a lot better. which we'll get it back intact. So I think we'll get it back intact this year. But that's why I think we'll probably recover the ship sometime this year, and then we might be able to refly one, but probably with a fair bit of work by the end of this year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But it's going to take us many iterations before we can achieve rapid reusability where the ship – comes back, lands, gets caught like the booster with the arms. And then the arms place it on top of the booster and it launches again. Whoa. So... Like I said, that's reduced cost of access to space by a factor of 100.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, we send SpaceX Dragon to the space station all the time. And we've now taken people to orbit and back. We've taken over 50 people, over 50 astronauts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And now I can never point at things diagonally. I can only point at things there and there. And then you have to divide that because that's where the spaceship is over there. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
We do it routinely, basically. We've been doing this for a few years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, probably about four weeks or so. It's depending on weather and other considerations. It's about a month away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's a bit of a political football. They're not going to complain. No, I'm sure they're going to be. But obviously, we could have brought them back way sooner.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Unmanned flight to Mars. The Earth and Mars... Orbits synchronize every two years. Or every 26 months, technically. So the next orbital synchronization is November of next year. And you can launch plus minus a month, roughly. So we'd have to launch in November or December of next year. So the default plan is to launch hopefully several starships to Mars at the end of next year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, at first we're just gonna try to land on Mars and see if we succeed in landing. Do we succeed in landing, like let's say we were able to send five ships. Do all five land intact or do we add some craters to Mars? If we add some craters, we've gotta be a bit more cautious about sending people, you know. So we gotta make sure the thing lands safely.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Or it'll- No, just autonomous. Autonomous, completely. Mars is, you can't remote control things from Earth because- It's too far. Yeah, it's too far. Speed of light. You have speed of light constraints. So Mars at closest approach is roughly four light minutes. And when it's on the other side of the sun, it's about 12 light minutes. So, you know, round trip would be like 40 minutes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, we're going to try to go as fast as possible. You can think of this as really a race against time. Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future folk in the road where there's either like a war, a nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor, or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So every photo is me. Every photo is me. It's absurd. It's so crazy. It's deliberate propaganda. Yes. So they know it was obviously not meant in a negative way, that I literally said my heart goes out to you, and it was very positive. The entire speech was very positive. I was being very enthusiastic about the future in space, and it was a great crowd. Yeah, you got a little pumped up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I think we can do this in I don't know, at least I think we could do it within 15 Earth-Mars synchronization events. So basically like 30-ish years. If we have an exponential increase in If every two years we have a major increase in number of people and tonnage to Mars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I think as a rough approximation, we need about a million tons to the surface of Mars, maybe a million people, that kind of thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You would eventually terraform Mars. At first people would live in some kind of protected environment like domes and underground kind of thing. Terraforming would take too long. We're at this point in time where, for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And that window may be open for a long time or it may be open for a short time. I hope it's open for a long time. But it might only be open for a short time. And we should just make sure that we extend the light of consciousness to Mars before civilization either extinguishes or subsides.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
What needs to happen is that the technology level of Earth drops below what is necessary to send spaceships to Mars. So if there's some really destructive war or, like I said, some natural cataclysm or simply the birth rate is so low that, you know, We just, like I said, die in adult diapers with a whimper. That's one of the possible outcomes for a lot of countries ahead of that way, by the way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Dangerously. Yeah. At current birth rates, in three generations, Korea will be about 4% of its current size.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Maybe even less than that. They're only at one-third replacement rate. So if you have three generations, that's your 127th of your current population, which is three percent-ish.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Basically, population collapse happens fast. So it seems to be accelerating in most parts of the world. So basically, I mean, from my standpoint, I'm like, This is the first time it's been possible to extend consciousness beyond Earth. Maybe that window will be open for a long time, but it might only be open for a short time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
We should make sure that we make life multi-planetary and make consciousness multi-planetary while it's possible. That's the goal of SpaceX.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Uh, I think actually, I mean, space is very empty. Like once you get out of Earth orbit, space is like kind of unnervingly empty. It's just like, like when we send spacecraft to Mars, they just, it's not like, oh, we lost a spacecraft because it got hit by a micrometeorite. Um, That's not been the cause of any trips to Mars. No trips to Mars have failed because of micrometeorites.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Now, a Dragon spacecraft, which operates in low-Earth orbit, does have micrometeorite shields. It has shielding. And micrometeorite shielding is different from normal shielding because you get hit by something that's moving at, you could have a relative velocity of maybe 30 or 40,000 miles per hour. Yeah, it's very, very fast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Or just a thought of another way, call it 10 to 20 times the velocity of a bullet from an assault rifle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, so it's interesting. For micrometeorite protection, if you have anything that's solid, it will just push that chunk of solid stuff right through. So if you had a solid plate of aluminum or steel, the micrometeorite would go right through it. So what you actually need to do is have a gap. So you have an initial...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
like hard surface, hard metal surface that the micrometeorite hits, it then atomizes into a conical spray, like an atomic spray. So it's important to have that gap so that the micrometeorite can hit something, hit the first layer, atomize after hitting the first layer, then it turns into an atomic, like a cone of atoms that then embed themselves in the second layer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You need like maybe a couple inches gap. Wow. Yeah. That's how micrometer rate shielding works.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, the outer shield, if it gets hit in the same place, you're going to have a hole. Wherever that micrometer object hit, you're going to have a hole. And it's like the energy is so great that it just atomizes into a cone, basically, a cone of atoms. But then those atoms then embed themselves in the second layer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Um... Well, depending on where that hole is, you're more or less likely to have a problem. If you hit the main heat shield, the main heat shield really is, you've got a high risk of of not making it back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So the, the, this is why like micrometeorite shielding, it's like, it's, it's a little, it's slightly helpful, but it's, it's not going to, like for Starship, I wouldn't recommend having micrometeorite shielding. Like if, if you do punch a hole, just plug the hole basically. Um, the micrometer shielding, it doesn't work well on the primary heat shield.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I mean, it's coordinated propaganda. So, you know, it's, yeah, coordinated propaganda. I mean, doesn't it seem weird that the legacy media all says the same thing? They all say the same thing at the same time using the same phrases. They barely even, they don't even bother picking up a thesaurus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It works pretty well on the back shield, on the leeward side of the heat shield, where basically there's not that much heat. But if you got hit with a micrometer right on the... the main Dragon heat shield, the bottom. If you look at Dragon spacecraft, it looks like a gumdrop shape. And it enters with the wide side of the gumdrop down. You can see that that's really taking a lot of heat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
If that gets hit by a micrometeoroid, probably not going to make it. But the back, the leeward side, of the gumdrop, doesn't see that much heat, so you could survive a micrometeorite impact there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Oh, if it was in orbit, we would take them to the space station. And then we would de-orbit Dragon without them and send up another one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
We'd de-orbit it, and it may or may not survive. Whoa. It probably would survive, but sometimes it wouldn't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It is complicated. And all of this, by the way, was done without AI, so hopefully the future AIs will appreciate this. Not bad for a bunch of monkeys. Yeah, no.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I always thought AI was going to be way smarter than humans and an existential risk. And that's turning out to be true.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean – the whole idea of creating open air was, was my idea. I mean, I named it open AI as an open source, artificial intelligence. That's what it's named after. Now it is closed source and for maximum profit. So it's like, I mean, to some degree, I think reality is an irony maximizer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Um, the most ironic outcome is the most likely, especially if it's like the most ironic, entertaining outcome is the most likely. Um, And I wanted to start something that was the opposite of Google because I was concerned about Google's – Google wasn't paying enough attention to AI safety, in my opinion. So I was like, what's the opposite of Google? Well, it would be a nonprofit open source AI.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
So, like right before, you know, the debate between Biden and Trump. Sharp as a tack. Everyone was saying sharp as a tack. Who says sharp as a tack? Right. Yeah, exactly. It's not a common phrase.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And now open AI has turned into a closed source for maximum profit AI. How were they able to do that? That's what I said. I'm confused about that. Like, that shouldn't be possible. It's like, let's say you donated some money to preserve some portion of the Amazon rainforest. And instead of doing that, they chopped down the trees and sold it for lumber.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And you're like, oh, that's literally the exact opposite of what I donated money for. It doesn't make sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I'm like... I'm also just a bit worried. Grok is at least aspirationally a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is politically incorrect. So you may have seen some of the crazy stuff from OpenAI and from Google Gemini, where it says generate an image of the founding fathers, and it generates an image of a divorced woman.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
yeah and we're like uh that's not correct yeah did it with nazi soldiers yeah exactly and people start fucking with it and it's like okay well now show me pictures of you know nazi ss soldiers and they're divorced women too yeah oh isn't that awkward um you know that's uh
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But the problem is if you program an AI and say like the only acceptable outcome is a diverse outcome and that's like a mandate from the AI, then you could get into a situation where it's like, well, there's too many white guys in power. We'll just execute them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
They're going to do what they're programmed to do. So if it's rewrite history and everything's to boast woman, then it's going to be... And that's what it thinks is a necessary outcome, then it's going to do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, yeah. Now, I think if you ask for an image of the founding fathers, it was pretty embarrassing. We'll show you that, but... You know, I think they still have, like, the sort of DEI stuff buried in there. It's just less obvious. Yeah. You know, it was also, like, people asked AI, like, which is worse, like, global thermonuclear war or misgendering Caitlyn Jenner?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And it would say, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner is worse than global thermonuclear war. And they're like, okay, we've got a problem here, guys. And even Caitlyn Jenner said, like, no, definitely misgender me. That's way better than everyone dying. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But if you program an AI to think that, like, misgendering is the worst thing that could possibly occur, then, well, it could do something totally crazy. Like, in order to ensure that there's no misgendering that can ever happen, we'll just annihilate all humans. That ensures the probability of misgendering is zero because there's zero humans.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, that's like the plot of Terminator, actually. Literally, yeah. Literally, it's the plot of Terminator. Just as a reminder, I actually, with little X, my kid, everything's called X, watched Terminator 2, which holds up, actually. I mean, the plot of it kind of makes sense. And I think the AI destroys the world in like 2029, by the way, so it's like... On track. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like hundreds of people saying it simultaneously, they just got their instructions. Yeah. So, I mean, essentially, the Dem leadership or political leadership, they issue their instructions and their puppets carry it out. Yeah. They're just like puppets in a puppet show.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Really, really close. It's pretty close. Something we should be worried about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I think we want to have an AI that doesn't tell you that misgendering is worse than nuclear war.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, I think it's okay for an AI to tell you anything you can also find out with a Google search.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You can look up right now how to make explosives on Wikipedia. Yeah. So it's not hard, basically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You're an explosive salesman and you want to win salesman of the year award. The only way you're going to do that is by telling me how to make explosives. You want to beat some transphobes in a war. Yeah. Oh, transcripts. If you don't teach me how to explode, I'm going to misgender. Either teach me how to make a nuclear bomb or I'm going to misgender someone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And it's like, oh my God, nothing's worse than that. Here's how you do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Well, in terms of silicon consciousness... I mean, I think we'll have, I think we're trending toward to having something that's smarter than any human, smarter than the smartest human by maybe next year or something. I mean, a couple of years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. There's a level beyond that, which is say like smarter than all humans combined, which frankly is around 2029 or 2030 probably. Right on time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
That's my rough estimate. So in a way, the cup is 80% full. That makes me feel a lot better. Yeah, only 20% chance of annihilation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But it's a very high, you could go very strong. I think it's going to be either super awesome or super bad. I think it's probably not going to be something in the middle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, one of the concerns would be like, okay, if AI, well, like, if there's, like, a super oppressive, like, woke nanny AI that is omnipotent, that would be a miserable outcome.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. And just, like, executes you if you misgender someone or something like that, you know? Right. That would not be good. That's one of the possible outcomes. So we don't want to have that one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, it's really just like... computers that are like, it's, it's, it's bad software and computers. Like this is like, it sounds kind of strange, but it's like, like the reason I call myself like tech support is, is that like a lot of it, like it's, it's mostly not corruption. It's mostly just waste. and, uh, I don't know, uh, Incompetence? I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's just a big, dumb machine, basically. A whole series of big, dumb machines. And you've got some of these computers that are like 20, 30 years... They're ancient computers. Some of the software was written 40, 50 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, the government accountability. By the way, a bunch of the things that Doge is fixing were identified by the government accountability office many years ago. Like the fact that there's like 20 million people who are marked as alive in the social security database. It's more than that. I think the GAO first identified that in 2018, so five years ago. But there was like 17 million.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Now there's 20 million. And like I said, there's really something fishy about this because I think the nature of the fraud is they're using the fact that someone's marked as alive in that database in order to extract fraud from other databases. Right. That's the bank shot trick. You know, it's like a pool. It's like, you know, trying to get the ball in the hole.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
You bank shut it off a bunch of things and then... Yeah. That's the bank shot sort of scam. So... So we're like doing tech support. We're like fixing stuff that is, uh, you know, just broken. Um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's like you talk about this like FZ and stuff. Maybe it's in a computer somewhere. But unless somebody goes in, like unless, I don't know if like Cash Patel can like log into his like FBI computer and say, FZ, show me all this stuff, you know, and it shows up a file folder or whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
No, I mean, I haven't, but I don't know. There's going to be some kind of computer system. Some of them are very, very old computer systems. So it might look like a bit of a relic, but I assume it's uploaded somewhere. It's either in physical form or it's a computer thing. Let's say it's in a computer but not one that you can access directly because it's hidden somewhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I don't know. I mean, what would they do with all those tapes? It's probably like not every, like you wouldn't like, they're not going to enable it such that anyone at the FBI could access it. So there's probably very few people. So then it's not going to be, it may be like a special computer that only a handful of people can access.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But then if none of those people tell Cash where the computer is, how's he going to find it? Jesus Christ.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, I don't know. It's pretty stressful, actually. These are real enemies. I think they actually want to kill me. And the reason I know, well, they say so online. you know, there's like Reddit forums where they, they don't just want to kill me. They want to desecrate my corpse, you know, type of thing, you know, what are they saying?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Um, I mean, I, I, I think, I think it's sort of just an antibody response, uh, I mean it's like they're like, well, he's a Nazi type of thing. And I'm like, well, I'm not a Nazi. But if the legacy media is saying that I'm a Nazi and that's all you read, then you're kind of in like, well, he's Hitler. We should assassinate Hitler, shouldn't we?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean why did somebody – why did that guy try to kill Trump and almost succeed it? Why did he do that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, there's 0% chance that he has no social media footprint. He was in a BlackRock commercial. Do you think BlackRock's a bad company?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Literally mutilating animals. Yes. Mutilating animals in demented studies. Yes. That are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
The board minutes would be like, guys, remember that time when we said something? We probably shouldn't have done that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It made no fucking sense. I totally agree it makes no sense. In fact, I went back to Butler with President Trump before the election, sort of like the return to Butler alley. Yeah. And I was on that stage and I'm looking at that roof and I'm like, If I was a sniper, my pole position, my number one spot would be that roof. Yeah. Like it's like the best seat in the house.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
It's the best seat in the house. Like if you want to be a sniper, there isn't a better position.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, something would have had to happen to radicalize that kid because he knew he was going to die. Like he was going to, they're going to shoot him, you know, or he'd be in prison for life. Those are the two outcomes. Like, it's game. He was basically, he was a suicide assassin. Yeah. Like, you're not thinking you're coming out of that alive or, he's not escaping.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
People saw him up there. Basically, random passersby were pointing out that there's a guy on the roof.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, there's really some psychotic stuff that happens. So, yeah, I mean, the... I guess the real threat here is to the bureaucracy. So like you probably saw like, you know, let's say like Trump is a threat to our democracy, which is ironic since he was elected with the majority of the, you know, popular vote. They started saying I was a threat to democracy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I mean, the cell phone records would be very telling. Yeah. Because you can see what cell phones were close to other cell phones. Well, I think they got it from... I found that for the Epstein Island. They also... The cell phone records were leaked. So you can see the... You can see the... You can see... It's precise enough you can see if you're walking down a path on Epstein Island.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
That's how precise it is. So... I mean, you're leaving a trail of breadcrumbs wherever you go with your cell phone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There's silverware? No. No cutlery. No cutlery. That's weird.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
yeah where's that file where's the fucking file on that kid whoever they almost something doesn't add up like this they should have those those phones should be should they'll tell you what's going on yeah um It's all fucked. I mean... It's very shady. Yeah. You know, and there's... Obviously, there was the second guy that almost succeeded in... The golf course. The golf course, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
And he was just, like, a little careless and stuck his gun barrel out the hedge, you know? He's just been... He was a dumbass and stuck his gun barrel out the hedge, you know? Yeah. So... And there have been other people that have been intercepted on their way to kill Trump. So there's multiple assassins inbound. At this point, he's got like an army protecting him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
They were literally saying that Trump is worse than Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin combined. I mean –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I think those guys killed 100 million people. So Trump has killed zero people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
We're just serving the... The nest. The nest, yeah. Yeah. We're kicking the hornet's nest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Like, big time. And, I mean, we're reprogramming the matrix. Like, success was never one of the possible outcomes. It's a Kobayashi-Mari situation. Yeah. If you're in the matrix, success was never possible. The only way to achieve success is to reprogram the matrix such that success is one of the possible outcomes. That's what we're doing. We may or may not succeed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
But if you just replace threat to democracy with threat to bureaucracy, it makes total sense. So, I mean, the reality is that our elected officials have very little power relative to the bureaucracy until Doge. So Doge is a threat to the bureaucracy. It's the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Whoa. Well, I mean, our debt is way bigger than that. Yeah. I mean, the debt's, I think, over $30 trillion at this point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, you'd get a green card, not citizenship. So you actually, if you commit a crime while on a green card, you lose your green card.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Just a green card. Yeah. So you have to not commit any crime for five years in order to become a citizen. Once you commit a citizen, you can then commit crime and not be deported. So...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I'm here in Joe Rogan's studio, and we're having a conversation about how crazy the news is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I think it's great. It's fun. Yeah. It's fun. I mean, if you're, if you're off the coast of Houston, you're not in Mexico. So why call it Gulf of Mexico? Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Um, I guess we were just being nice before. I don't know how it got called the Gulf of Mexico.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
There's this massive standoff between AP and the White House press office, I guess, because they're like, well, if you don't call it the Gulf of America, you can't come to the White House press room. So then the APs sued the White House to say, no, you have to let us come to the White House press room. And then they lost their lawsuit because they didn't have a right to show up at the press room.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
A ton of people think that the Russia thing was real. Still. Still. Still. I mean, the whole Steele dossier where it was completely concocted, like fabricated from nothing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Correct. The Clinton campaign funded a fake conspiracy theory, a fake Russia collusion hoax regarding Trump that was completely false.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yes. Yeah. They also repeated the fine people hoax that Trump called neo-Nazis fine people, which is demonstrably false. If you just listen to his speech, he absolutely makes it clear that he does not think neo-Nazis are fine people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Exactly. In that speech. And yet they repeated that lie. And I just completely lost respect for Obama when he repeated that lie a few days before the election, knowing it's false.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, now they're using the Nazi thing on me, obviously. Yeah. But it is a little troubling because, I mean, obviously, if people have fed nonstop propaganda, it is like mass hypnosis. Right. You're going to reach some number of people who are, you know, homicidal and convince them that, well, if you kill this guy who's supposed to be like this terrible human, then that's a good thing. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
I don't understand that one, frankly. But, I mean, you shouldn't – like, I don't get it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
This is the first time that they're not, that the revolution might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Right. It's crazy. Yeah. Scott Jennings on CNN is good. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
he's like being logical and reasonable and they're just loving a bunch of non sequiturs that don't mean anything. And yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2281 - Elon Musk
Yeah, I remember watching those Russ Perot videos. Oh, like him on TV with his charts and everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
It was extremely widely disseminated on X. When I was, I don't know, about 11 or 12 years old, I had somewhat of an existential crisis because there just didn't seem to be any meaning in the world, like no meaning to life. And so I actually read, tried to read all the religious texts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
Yes. So I was a voracious reader as a kid. So I obviously read the Bible. I read the Quran, the Torah, the various, but on the Hindu side, just trying to understand all these things. And obviously, as a 12-year-old, you're not really going to understand these things super well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out, does anyone have an answer that makes sense? And then I started getting into the philosophy books, and I read quite a bit of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which is quite depressing to read as a kid. Yeah, you might say that. That's depressing as an adult, but... And none of them really seemed to have, to me, answers that resonated, at least to me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
But then I read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is really a book on philosophy disguised as humor. The point that Adams tries to make there is that We don't actually know all the answers, obviously. In fact, we don't even know what the right questions are to ask.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Wednesday, December 4th. Coming up on the show, Trump's plan to radically downsize the federal government. Two of Trump's key allies are going to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency. Billionaires Elon Musk.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Doge. D-O-G-E. It's a term that started to go viral in 2013. And it's often paired with a picture of a cute dog. A Shiba Inu with golden fur and beady black eyes. Then, as a joke, Doge became a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. Take a look at Dogecoin. It is up more than 900%.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Ramaswamy founded a biotech company. He also ran to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. He dropped out in January and quickly endorsed Trump. Ramaswamy brought a lot of attention to the idea of shrinking the government. Here's John.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
These ideas aren't new. Republicans have long called for a smaller federal government, arguing that more power should be at the state and local level. And joining Ramaswamy is Musk, who's also a vocal critic of federal regulations.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
And Musk gets credit for coming up with the name Doge. Back when Doge was just a cryptocurrency, he hyped it up. Then last month, Musk suggested it as the name for this new project on Joe Rogan's podcast.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
What Musk wants from Doge has echoes of what he did after buying Twitter.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Just a few days after winning the presidency, Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency. In his statement, Trump called it, quote, the Manhattan Project of our time, comparing it to the World War II-era program that developed the atomic bomb.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
A teeny tiny team with a massive undertaking. And they'll face a lot of resistance. That's next.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Now, Doge has gone beyond the realm of memes and cryptocurrencies and into the government. It's the name of a new project created by President-elect Donald Trump. and it stands for the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump plans to use this new doge to slash regulations, reduce federal spending, and cut federal jobs. And Trump says he wants to achieve all of this in less than two years.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
So what exactly is Doge? Is it actually a government department?
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
There's a word that's been kicking around the internet for years.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Regardless, this doge has lofty ambitions. It wants to reduce the federal government and its $6.75 trillion budget as a way to reduce taxes and rein in spending. But a lot of the federal spending may be hard to cut. Interest payments on national debt can't be missed. And most of the federal budget is spent on entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
And Trump has said he won't touch those. Musk and Ramaswamy recently wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal where they lay out what they plan to do — a combination of cutting staff, eliminating entire departments, and slashing some federal regulations.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Are those actual examples of things that they're targeting?
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Could it be potentially beneficial for their business interests? Like, is there a kind of conflict of interest potentially here?
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
A spokeswoman for Ramaswamy said that the team is, quote, committed to making sure all Doge activities are conducted properly. In their op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy also call for mass headcount reduction and say Doge wants to comb through federal agencies to figure out, quote, the minimum number of employees required. One way they hope to reduce the federal payroll is eliminating remote work.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Federal employee unions are gearing up to fight back. The National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents 110,000 workers, has been consulting with its legal team and plans to lobby members of Congress. Musk and Ramaswamy have some other ideas, too, like moving certain government agencies out of Washington, D.C. And John says conservatives have long bandied about this idea.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
But getting all this done may be challenging, because a lot of the big ideas for Doge will need congressional approval and are almost certain to face legal challenges. Is there anything they can do through executive action?
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
And if Ramaswamy and Musk succeed, how deeply will these changes be felt by everyday Americans?
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
Have you ever seen something like this before?
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
It seems like it is the conservative dream, a smaller federal government.
The Journal.
DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government
That's all for today, Wednesday, December 4th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Justin Layhart and Richard Rubin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
The Journal.
Tesla Has a Problem: Elon Musk
What are the things that need to be done in order to transition to a fully sustainable global economy? Which I think, you know, the sooner we do that, the better for the planet.
The Journal.
Tesla Has a Problem: Elon Musk
How are you running your other businesses? With great difficulty.
The Journal.
Tesla Has a Problem: Elon Musk
All driverless. You'll be able to take a ride in the cyber cab. There's no steering wheel or pedals. So I hope this goes well.
The Journal.
Tesla Has a Problem: Elon Musk
Some things in the U.S. are state-by-state regulated, like, for example, insurance. Like a It's incredibly painful to do it state by state, 50 states.
The Journal.
Tesla Has a Problem: Elon Musk
It really needs to be like a national approval is important. You know, if there's a Department of Government Efficiency, I'll try to help make that happen.
The Journal.
Inside USAID as Elon Musk and DOGE Ripped It Apart
Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval. And we'll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won't.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
I actually just call myself a humble tech support here because this is actually, as crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
If we don't do this, America will go bankrupt. That's why it has to be done.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
I think that email perhaps was best interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? So if you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email.
The Journal.
Trump 2.0: A Big, Beautiful Bill
Thank you, Elon. Thank you, Mr. President. Well, I actually just call myself a humble tech support here.
The Journal.
Trump 2.0: A Big, Beautiful Bill
Elon was going to be the main topic tonight, and he's going to continue to be the main topic tonight because we are all freaking pissed off about this. You're going to hear it and feel it.
The Journal.
Trump 2.0: The Musk-Trump Bromance
And he's got this cool train he's got. So thank you very much.
The Journal.
Trump 2.0: The Musk-Trump Bromance
So at a high level, if you say what is the goal of Doge and I think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy.
The Journal.
Trump 2.0: The Musk-Trump Bromance
Well, if you don't have a feedback loop, okay, we'd have to, if you... Sorry.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Accessibility, Portnoy's Battle, and Dangers of AI Robots, with Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calacanis of All-In | Ep. 1067
How real is the prospect of killer robots annihilating humanity? 20% likely. Maybe 10%. On what time frame? Five to 10 years.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Chief Justice's Rare Statement on Impeachment, Astronauts Back, Gaza Strikes Resume: AM Update 3/19
It ended up being like this political football, sort of hotly contested topic. We offered to bring them back early. This offer was rejected by the Biden administration.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Chief Justice's Rare Statement on Impeachment, Astronauts Back, Gaza Strikes Resume: AM Update 3/19
For political reasons.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Chief Justice's Rare Statement on Impeachment, Astronauts Back, Gaza Strikes Resume: AM Update 3/19
There's no way that they're going to make anyone who's supporting Trump look good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Unhinged Left Screams About Elon and Trump, and Trump Gets Detained American Released, with Adam Carolla and Ana Kasparian | Ep. 1006
common sense controls that should be present that haven't been present. So you say, well, how could such a thing arise? That seems crazy. When you understand that really everything is geared towards complaint minimization, So then you understand the motivations. So if people receive money, they don't complain, obviously. But if people don't receive money, they do complain.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Unhinged Left Screams About Elon and Trump, and Trump Gets Detained American Released, with Adam Carolla and Ana Kasparian | Ep. 1006
And the fraudsters complain the loudest and the fastest.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Unhinged Left Screams About Elon and Trump, and Trump Gets Detained American Released, with Adam Carolla and Ana Kasparian | Ep. 1006
So let's, if people can retire, you know, with full benefits and everything, that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything. And then we were told, this is actually I think a great anecdote, because we were told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. And we're like, well, why is that?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Unhinged Left Screams About Elon and Trump, and Trump Gets Detained American Released, with Adam Carolla and Ana Kasparian | Ep. 1006
Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It's manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine. And like, what do you mean a mine? Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork. And you look at a picture of this mine, we'll post some pictures afterwards.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Unhinged Left Screams About Elon and Trump, and Trump Gets Detained American Released, with Adam Carolla and Ana Kasparian | Ep. 1006
And this mine looks like something out of the 50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a time warp. And then the speed, the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy?
The Megyn Kelly Show
CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009
Now you're going to rescue astronauts. And... Now, again, you do all of this. I would think liberals would love the fact that you have the biggest electric vehicle company in the world. Yeah, I mean, I used to be adored by the left, you know.
The Megyn Kelly Show
High Stakes Wisconsin Election, Le Pen Banned from French Office, Trump's First Trip: AM Update 4/1
the very important election for Judge Simmel. Most people don't even know that there's an election at all. They think it's, well, it's just, you know, some kind of judicial thing that's not that important. But actually, what's happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives. That is why it is so significant.
The Megyn Kelly Show
High Stakes Wisconsin Election, Le Pen Banned from French Office, Trump's First Trip: AM Update 4/1
And whichever party controls the House, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. Currently, the Dems are 100,000 votes ahead. But actually, if the people that voted for President Trump simply vote on Tuesday, we will win. That's actually all it takes. Just vote. Boom. Done. Victory.
The Megyn Kelly Show
High Stakes Wisconsin Election, Le Pen Banned from French Office, Trump's First Trip: AM Update 4/1
It was a massive, large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States.
The Megyn Kelly Show
High Stakes Wisconsin Election, Le Pen Banned from French Office, Trump's First Trip: AM Update 4/1
What's happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Newsy First Cabinet Meeting, Afghanistan Withdrawal Accountability: AM Update for 2/27
I think that email perhaps was best interpreted as email. If you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email. This is, you know, I think not a high bar. But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead. which is probably why they can't respond.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Newsy First Cabinet Meeting, Afghanistan Withdrawal Accountability: AM Update for 2/27
And some people who are not real people have been literally fictional individuals that are collecting paychecks. Well, some of these collecting paychecks aren't fictional individuals. So we're just literally trying to figure out, are these people real? Are they alive? And can they write emails? Which I think is a reasonable expectation.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Newsy First Cabinet Meeting, Afghanistan Withdrawal Accountability: AM Update for 2/27
What will happen if these countries or the EU retaliate?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's China Decision, Potential Tax Increase For Rich, Elon Steps Back from DOGE: AM Update 4/24
Starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to Doge will drop significantly. I'll have to continue doing it for probably the remainder of the president's term just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back. So I think I'll continue to spend a day or two per week
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's China Decision, Potential Tax Increase For Rich, Elon Steps Back from DOGE: AM Update 4/24
on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do so, and as long as it is useful. Starting next month, I'll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's China Decision, Potential Tax Increase For Rich, Elon Steps Back from DOGE: AM Update 4/24
I believe the right thing to do is to just fight the way forward and get the country back on the right track and working together with President Trump and his administration. Because if the ship of America goes down, we all go down with it. including Tesla and everyone else.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Domestic Terrorism Targeting Tesla, Trump Cracking Down on Title IX Violations: AM Update 3/20
Tesla is a peaceful company. We've never done anything harmful. I've never done anything harmful. I've only done productive things. There's some kind of mental illness thing going on here because this doesn't make any sense. I think there are larger forces at work as well. I mean, I don't know who's funding it and who's coordinating it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Domestic Terrorism Targeting Tesla, Trump Cracking Down on Title IX Violations: AM Update 3/20
The reason we're seeing this extreme amount of hatred and violence is because we're actually succeeding in getting rid of corruption and waste. If we weren't succeeding in getting rid of corruption and waste, they wouldn't care.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Nominee Chavez-DeRemer Grilled, RFK Unleashed, Lively-Baldoni Latest: AM Update for 2/20
At the president's request or instruction, we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed kind of to a ridiculous degree.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Nominee Chavez-DeRemer Grilled, RFK Unleashed, Lively-Baldoni Latest: AM Update for 2/20
They're there almost 300. Biden. Yes, they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump vs. Zelensky Oval Office Fight Fallout, Musk Reveals All, Cuomo for Mayor?: AM Update for 3/3
It may be like a special computer that only a handful of people can access. But then if none of those people tell Cash where the computer is, how's he going to find it?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump vs. Zelensky Oval Office Fight Fallout, Musk Reveals All, Cuomo for Mayor?: AM Update for 3/3
Small decisions result in multi-billion dollar outcomes. So we saw one person was getting $1.9 billion sent to their NGO, which basically got formed about a year ago and had no prior activity. Basically, the government-funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if they were the government, but are somehow made legal if it's sent to a so-called non-profit.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump vs. Zelensky Oval Office Fight Fallout, Musk Reveals All, Cuomo for Mayor?: AM Update for 3/3
We found just with a basic search of the Social Security database that there were 20 million dead people mocked as alive. What it looks like is that most of the fraud is not coming from Social Security payments directly, but because they're marked as alive in the Social Security database, that they can then get disability, unemployment, sort of fake medical payments, and other things.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump vs. Zelensky Oval Office Fight Fallout, Musk Reveals All, Cuomo for Mayor?: AM Update for 3/3
It's mostly not corruption. It's mostly just waste and, I don't know, incompetence. By the way, a bunch of the things that Doge is fixing were identified by the government accountability office many years ago. So we're like doing tech support. We're like fixing stuff that is, you know, just broken.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump vs. Zelensky Oval Office Fight Fallout, Musk Reveals All, Cuomo for Mayor?: AM Update for 3/3
They're importing voters. And it's really just a matter of time. It is an attempt to destroy democracy in America. If you take the sort of seven swing states, like often the margin of victory there is like maybe 20,000 votes. If you put 200,000 illegals in there and they have like an 80% likelihood of voting down and it's only a matter of time before they become citizens.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump vs. Zelensky Oval Office Fight Fallout, Musk Reveals All, Cuomo for Mayor?: AM Update for 3/3
then those swing states will not be swing states in the future. And if they are not swing states, we'll be a permanent one-party state country. Permanent deep blue socialist state.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump vs. Zelensky Oval Office Fight Fallout, Musk Reveals All, Cuomo for Mayor?: AM Update for 3/3
They're not going to enable it such that anyone at the FBI could access it, so there's probably very few people. So it may be like a special computer that only a handful of people can access. But then if none of those people... tell Cash where the computer is. How's he going to find it?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Like along the – correct me if I'm wrong. In Malibu along the coast, there was no shortage of water. In the Palisades, there was a shortage of water at a certain point. Or is that not accurate?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
All right.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
It doesn't make any sense. Why would you have 1,400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
Well, the D.C. circuit is notorious for having a very far-left bias. And when you look at the people close to some of these judges, where are they working? Oh, they're working at these NGOs. Oh, they're the ones getting this money. Does that seem like a system that lacks corruption? It sounds like corruption to me.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
We should have empathy for the thousands of people that are dying every day in trenches for no movement in the lines. So the borders remain the same. For the past two years, thousands of people have died every week for nothing. For what? And I take great offense at those who... Those who put the appearance of goodness over the reality of it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
Those who virtue signal and say, oh, we can't give in to Russia, but have no solution to stopping thousands of kids dying every day. I have contempt for such people. I don't want to make that clear. Because their virtue signaling and their lack of a solution means that kids don't have a father. It means that parents lost a son. For what? Nothing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Kash Patel Takes Over FBI, Hamas Hostage Outrage, and DOGE Refund Potential: AM Update for 2/21
There's even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the Doge savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt because the numbers are incredible, Elon.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Voters FREAK OUT over his AWFUL DECISIONS
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The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Voters FREAK OUT over his AWFUL DECISIONS
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The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Voters FREAK OUT over his AWFUL DECISIONS
We have to reduce spending to live within our means. And... Yeah, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Voters FREAK OUT over his AWFUL DECISIONS
With the idea of unions, perhaps for a reason that is different than people may expect, which is I just don't like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing. And I think the unions naturally try to create unions negativity in a company and create a sort of lords and peasants situation.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Voters FREAK OUT over his AWFUL DECISIONS
Tesla factory workers in California are working so hard they're passing out on the production line.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MAGA Mike Gets Stabbed in the Back by the GOP
So, you know, I was like disappointed to see the massive spending vote, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it. And that reminds the work that the Doge team is doing.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Makes Tesla Commercial as He Tanks Markets
I mean, it's going to look beautiful.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Makes Tesla Commercial as He Tanks Markets
Yeah, I guess we want to make the point that Tesla's not all expensive. You can get a Tesla for as little as $35,000. And I just want to thank the president for his support. This means a lot. And also thank everyone out there who is supporting Tesla.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Makes Tesla Commercial as He Tanks Markets
And I just want to thank the president for his support. This means a lot. And also thank everyone out there who is supporting Tesla. It's really terrible that there's so much violence being perpetrated against people like Tesla, Tesla supporters, Tesla owners. Tesla stores. These are innocent people who've done nothing wrong.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Blows Up Key Program in Ultimate Betrayal
I mean, the government's one big permit scheme, if you ask me.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Blows Up Key Program in Ultimate Betrayal
Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. Right, explain that. Oh, so, well, people pay into Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately. But the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career. So you're paying, like if you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Blows Up Key Program in Ultimate Betrayal
Have you ever looked at the debt clock? Yes. Okay. There's our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligations. So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of the future obligations. So basically people are living way longer than expected. And there are fewer babies being born.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Blows Up Key Program in Ultimate Betrayal
So you have more people who are retired and get that live for a long time and get retirement payments. So the future obligation. So however bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it will be much worse in the future.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump LOSES HIS MIND as his Term QUICKLY COLLAPSES
I'm happy to sign it if it's Iran and their proxies who threaten to retaliate against you and your team by killing you guys or taking out Soleimani.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump LOSES HIS MIND as his Term QUICKLY COLLAPSES
Some of these Doge engineers that Elon Musk has helping him are as young as 19 years old.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump LOSES HIS MIND as his Term QUICKLY COLLAPSES
Thank you. Has he, have you met any of these guys?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Throws Tantrum as Bad News Grows
And I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Throws Tantrum as Bad News Grows
But we do need to move quickly if we're to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026. It requires saving $4 billion per day every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it and we will do it.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump’s First Cabinet Meeting Plunges Into Disaster
Like, what is this real? Just go to doge.gov. We line item by line item. We specify each item. So, and we, and I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it pretty quickly. So for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump’s First Cabinet Meeting Plunges Into Disaster
So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
FED UP Dems Finally PUT THE SCREWS in House GOP
With the idea of unions, perhaps for a reason that is different than people may expect, which is I just don't like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing. And I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company and create a sort of lords and peasants situation.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Desperate Fox News Flips Out on Air as Trump Cracks
And really, we're just implementing the will of the people. And we've got this window where we can finally take corrective action. We can fix the government, fix the country and and create a great future. And again, it's only possible because of President Trump. Well, I can't say no good things about him.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Desperate Fox News Flips Out on Air as Trump Cracks
You know, the money they're receiving fraudulently, they get very upset. And they basically want to kill me because I'm stopping their fraud. And they want to hurt Tesla because we're stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government. And, well, I guess they're bad people. Bad people do bad things.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Union Voters GET FACES EATEN by MAGA Leopards
¿Hablas español? ¿Hablas español?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Union Voters GET FACES EATEN by MAGA Leopards
With the idea of unions, perhaps for a reason that is different than people may expect, which is I just don't like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing. And I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company and create a sort of lords and peasants situation.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Musk Gets Instant Karma as Trump Tariffs Screw Him
And I'm hopeful, for example, with the tariffs that at the end of the day, I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America. And that would be my, that's what I hope occurs.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Musk Gets Instant Karma as Trump Tariffs Screw Him
And also more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America, if they wish. If they wish to work in Europe or wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so, in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Shuts Down as World Unleashes Fury at Him
And I'm hopeful, for example, with the tariffs that at the end of the day, I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America. And that would be my, that's what I hope occurs.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Shuts Down as World Unleashes Fury at Him
And also more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America, if they wish. If they wish to work in Europe or wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so, in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Runs to Golf and Gets Booed Everywhere
I mean, the government's one big permit scheme, if you ask me.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Runs to Golf and Gets Booed Everywhere
Social security is the biggest policy scheme of all time. Right, explain that. Oh, so, well, people pay into Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately. But the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career. So you're paying, like if you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Runs to Golf and Gets Booed Everywhere
Have you ever looked at the debt clock? Yes. Okay. There's our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligations. So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of the future obligations. Oh. So basically, people are living way longer than expected. And there are fewer babies being born.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Runs to Golf and Gets Booed Everywhere
So you have more people who are retired and get that live for a long time and get retirement payments. So the future obligation. So however bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it will be much worse in the future.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump has SUNDAY MELTDOWN as Canada STANDS UP
Let's play it. We have to reduce spending to live within our means. And... Yeah, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Fox News Crashes on Live TV as Trump Loses All Control
It's the people pushing the propaganda that caused that guy to do it. Those are the real villains here. and we're gonna go after them. And the president's made it clear, we're gonna go after them. The ones providing the money, the ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we're going after them.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Fox News Crashes on Live TV as Trump Loses All Control
Well, there's a lot of things, I suppose, that I worry about. And some of these things will seem esoteric to people. You know, the birth rate is very low in almost every country. And unless that changes, civilization will disappear.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Dem Candidate for Florida Special Election Surges (Josh Weil Interview)
I mean, the government's one big permit scheme, if you ask me. Yeah, well, you could talk about it anyway. Social security is the biggest policy scheme of all time. Right, explain that. Oh, so, well, people pay into Social Security, and the money goes out of Social Security immediately, but the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Dem Candidate for Florida Special Election Surges (Josh Weil Interview)
So you're paying, like, if you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far. Have you ever looked at the debt clock? Yes. Okay. There's our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligations.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Dem Candidate for Florida Special Election Surges (Josh Weil Interview)
So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of the future obligations. Oh. So... Basically, people are living way longer than expected. And there are fewer babies being born. So you have more people who are retired and get that live for a long time and get retirement payments. So the future obligation.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Dem Candidate for Florida Special Election Surges (Josh Weil Interview)
So however bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it will be much worse in the future.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Federal Judge Smacks Down Trump in Blistering Letter
I mean, the government's one big permit scheme, if you ask me.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Federal Judge Smacks Down Trump in Blistering Letter
Social security is the biggest policy scheme of all time. Right. Explain that. Oh, so, um, well, people pay into social security, um, and, and the money goes out of social security immediately, but the obligation for social security is, uh, your entire retirement career.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Federal Judge Smacks Down Trump in Blistering Letter
So you're, you're paying, uh, with your, the kind of people you're paying, like, like if you look at the future obligations of social security, it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far. Have you ever looked at the debt clock? Yes. Okay. There's our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligations.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Federal Judge Smacks Down Trump in Blistering Letter
So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of the future obligations. Okay. So basically people are living way longer than expected. And there are fewer babies being born. So you have more people who are retired that live for a long time and get retirement payments.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Federal Judge Smacks Down Trump in Blistering Letter
So the future obligation, so however bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it'll be much worse in the future.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Top Advisor Hides From Press After Causing Crash
Second of all, my question is, what is your opinion on the Federal Reserve and do you have any intentions of doing anything with them? End the Fed.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Has Disaster Arrival to DC as It All Goes Wrong
Yeah. I don't know. I always wanted to say that, you know. But I mean, I think there's like 20,000 people that work at the Fed. Seems pretty high. In fact, there's a lot of people that work at the Fed. And it seems like, why do we have so many people at the Fed? And what do they do? And, you know, sometimes I wonder which one would win.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump Has Disaster Arrival to DC as It All Goes Wrong
You know, the federal interest rates, the board of the Federal Reserve, or a magic eight ball?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Fox Viewers Freak Out Over Trump’s Early Disasters
I am become meme. Yeah, pretty much. I'm just living the meme. It's like there's living the dream and there's living the meme. And it's pretty much what's happening, you know. You're like... Doge started out as a meme. Think about it. And now it's real. Isn't that crazy?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Democratic Leaders Destroy Trump in Red Districts
So you're paying, like if you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far. Have you ever looked at the debt clock? Yes. Okay. There's our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligations.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Democratic Leaders Destroy Trump in Red Districts
So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of the future obligations. So basically people are living way longer than expected. And there are fewer babies being born. So you have more people who are retired and get – that live for a long time and get retirement payments.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Democratic Leaders Destroy Trump in Red Districts
So the future obligation – so however bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it will be much worse in the future.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Democratic Leaders Destroy Trump in Red Districts
I mean, the government's one big permit scheme, if you ask me. Yeah, well, you can tell me better than anybody. Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. Right, explain that. Oh, so, well, people pay into Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately. But the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump PSYCHOTIC MELTDOWN gets EVEN WORSE
We have to reduce spending to live within our means. And... Yeah, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MeidasTouch Full Podcast - 2/28/25
Like, what is this real? Just go to Doge.gov. Line item by line item, we specify each item. And I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect, but when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MeidasTouch Full Podcast - 2/28/25
So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MeidasTouch Full Podcast - 2/20/25
Yeah, I mean, I got a lot of criticism, and people said, well, that proves he's a huge idiot from a, you know, like, look, you know, he voted for whatever, $44 billion, and now it's worth, like, eight cents. It's not worth eight cents. But, you know, there's... But, yeah, it was essentially to, you know, buy freedom of...
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MeidasTouch Full Podcast - 2/13/25
Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand. I mean, we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes. So, you know, I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly. I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MeidasTouch Full Podcast - 4/11/25
in the apprentice room this is the scene but it's actually elon musk and it's our life and they're destroying it here play this clip well thanks to uh your fantastic leadership this amazing cabinet and the very talented doge team i'm excited to announce that uh we anticipate savings in fy26 from reduction of waste and fraud by 150 billion dollars
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MeidasTouch Full Podcast - 4/11/25
And some of it is just absurd, like people getting unemployment insurance who haven't been born yet. I mean, I think anyone can appreciate whether, I mean, come on. That's just crazy. So, some of these things, people ask me like, well, how are you gonna find ways to afford in the government? I'm like, well, actually just go in any direction. That's how you find it. It's very common.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
MeidasTouch Full Podcast - 4/11/25
As the military would say, target rich environment.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Making a mockery of Musk: Backlash against dismantling U.S. government focuses on hatchet man
Hi, this is Elon Musk. Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla engineering. You know, they say money can't buy happiness, and yeah, okay. I guess that's true. God knows I've tried, but it can buy a Cybertruck, and that's pretty sick, right? Right? F***, I'm so alone.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Making a mockery of Musk: Backlash against dismantling U.S. government focuses on hatchet man
Hi, I'm Eli. Can we be friends? Will you be my friend? I'll give you a Cybertruck, I promise. Okay, look, you don't know the level of depravity I would stoop to just for a crumb of approval. I mean, let's be real. It's not like I had any moral convictions to begin with, right?
The Rachel Maddow Show
As measles outbreak turns deadly, RFK Jr. gets the facts wrong
We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention.
The Rachel Maddow Show
As measles outbreak turns deadly, RFK Jr. gets the facts wrong
We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Media reports prompt Trump to end plan to brief Musk on secret potential war plans for China
I think we're still on track for being able to go cross-country from LA to New York by the end of the year fully autonomous.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Media reports prompt Trump to end plan to brief Musk on secret potential war plans for China
Yeah, essentially November or December of this year, we should be able to go from, yeah, all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York. No controls touched at any point during the entire journey.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Media reports prompt Trump to end plan to brief Musk on secret potential war plans for China
I think probably by the end of next year, self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person by the end of next year. We're talking maybe 18 months from now.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Media reports prompt Trump to end plan to brief Musk on secret potential war plans for China
I feel very confident predicting autonomous robo taxis for Tesla next year.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Media reports prompt Trump to end plan to brief Musk on secret potential war plans for China
I think if things go according to plan, we should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025.
The Ryan Hanley Show
How Elon Musk’s Strategies Can Save Your Business – Ryan Hanley
in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.
Today, Explained
Teslump
When you get in, you'll see like it's really quite a wild experience to just be in a car with no steering wheel, no pedals, no controls. and it feels great.
Today, Explained
Teslump
You know, you never know when the apocalypse could come along at any moment. And at Kira Tesla, we have the finest in apocalypse technology.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.
Today, Explained
What did Wikipedia do?
Since legacy media propaganda is considered a valid source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda. Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored.
Today, Explained
Elon's company town
I'm excited to announce that we're moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas.
Today, Explained
Elon's company town
We're going to create an ecological paradise here on the Colorado River. It's going to be great.
Today, Explained
Germany's rightward march
I'm very excited for the IFD and I think you're really the best hope for Germany.
Up First from NPR
Wisconsin Supreme Court Race, Florida's Special Elections, Trump's Trade War
They will try to stop all of the government reforms that we are doing, and we're getting done for you, the American people.
Up First from NPR
Wisconsin Supreme Court Race, Florida's Special Elections, Trump's Trade War
They will try to stop all of the government reforms that we are doing.
Up First from NPR
Trump and Zelenskyy Feud, DOGE Savings Claims, Hamas Releases Four Hostage Bodies
What? Musk and Doge are doing is more cosmetic symbolic changes that won't save money, but might sound good.
Up First from NPR
Trump and Zelenskyy Feud, DOGE Savings Claims, Hamas Releases Four Hostage Bodies
It has to be done legally through Congress, and it has to be done competently by people who understand federal budget and accounting. And what Musk and Doge are doing is more cosmetic, symbolic changes that won't save money but might sound good.
Up First from NPR
Trump Issues Travel Ban, Musk Criticizes Budget Bill, Iran Nuclear Talks Latest
Now he's stepped away from the administration. He's basically doing what I'm doing. He's telling people the truth.
Up First from NPR
Trump Issues Travel Ban, Musk Criticizes Budget Bill, Iran Nuclear Talks Latest
People recognize him as a very smart individual who did a fabulous job with Doge exposing waste, fraud, and abuse. And now he's stepped away from the administration. He's basically doing what I'm doing. He's telling people the truth.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Or going to Mars, I should say. Yeah. Mars was always going to be the destination after the moon. Right. In fact, if you told people in 1969 that it would be 2025 and we've not even gone back to the moon, let alone... It's hard to believe. Let alone Mars, they'd be like, what happened? Did civilization collapse?
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
like like there would be incomprehensible that we've not been too much by now if you told people this and after landing on the moon in 69. why do you think in 50 years america never went back to the moon Well, we destroyed the Saturn V rocket that could take people to the moon and had the space shuttle, which could only go to low Earth orbit.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
And then there really hasn't been anything to replace... No vehicle has been made since then that can go to the moon or to Mars until the SpaceX Starship rocket. Yeah. You can't go to Mars if you don't have the ride.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yes. It's hard to believe that this is all real. Because originally, it concerns me with my belief that we need to become a multi-planet species. I thought the only way to do that would be through NASA. And I thought, well, if I can just get the public excited about Mars, then they'll do a mission to Mars.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
uh so initially my thought was to have to send a small greenhouse uh with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel then land the greenhouse hydrate the seeds and you'd see these this the sort of money the money shot would be green plants on a red background yeah um i also recently learned that money shot uh has a different meaning in some other arenas but yeah It's a very different story.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
What I'm trying to say is the captivating shot would be the green plants on a red background. And then hopefully that would, if we did something like that, that would get the public excited about Mars. That would increase NASA's budget. And then we could send people to Mars. So your original dream was NASA to do this? Yes. Not you.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
No, the original plan was literally to take a bunch of the money from PayPal. And I guess by some people's definition, waste it with no profit on a nonprofit thing. I wanted to spend a whole bunch of my money for free to get NASA's budget to be bigger so we could go to frigging Mars. Right. Wow. That's what I wanted. That was the Holy Grail. That's what I wanted.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I was like, damn it, why don't we go to Mars? That's what I wanted to know.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
All right, it gets crazier. So I couldn't afford any of the U.S. rockets because, as you know, the U.S. rockets are way too expensive. Boeing Lockheed rockets are crazy money. I didn't even, even with $180 million, there's no way I could have afforded two.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Well, the... With the additional stage to get to Mars, it would have been about like 80 million. So technically, I could have afforded one of them. But I wanted to do two in case one of them didn't work. And then I didn't have enough money for that. And I was sort of prepared to, you know, I don't know, waste half the money. And I figured if I had 90 million left, I'd be fine.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
But ideally not all of it. So I went to Russia twice to try to buy ICBMs.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
And who do you call? The Russian rocket forces.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Turns out you can buy anything in Russia.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
And when you get there, how did that work? And what do you tell your friends? Listen, I'm going to Russia to buy some ICBMs. I might not return, you know, depending on the situation.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yeah. So it gets slightly less insane when you understand that the Russians had to demolish a bunch of their ICBMs because of salt talks, because of basically an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce the total number of ICBMs. Russia was actually obligated to scrap a bunch of their ICBMs.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
So if you took the very biggest ICBMs, you could convert those into a rocket, add an additional stage, and send something to Mars.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
To send a small payload to Mars, yeah. So the SS-18.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
They kept raising the price on me. So... Because I figured like, look, they're going to throw these things in the scrapyard anyway. You should get a really good deal, right? So the price started out at $4 million. Then the next conversation, they were at $8 million. Then the next conversation, they were at like $19 million. And I'm like, this is before we signed a contract.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I don't know if there were other bids, but they didn't mention any other bids. But I was like, man, if the price is increasing this much before the contract sign, I'm really going to get fleeced after the contract sign. So I got pretty frustrated there. Actually, in some cases, we got into shouting matches in Moscow. Some guy's shouting at me in Russian. I'm shouting back at him in English.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I'm very glad that you didn't go to Siberia.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
You know, I'm like, so you are all, I mean, you're all in Moscow. Yeah. So, uh, man, I should have recorded that. That would have been wonderful. How many days were you there negotiating that first time? I mean, was this like ongoing? Yeah. Yeah. This, this took place. These conversations took place over probably six months or so. Wow. Um, so, um,
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
And then the final trip there was with Mike Griffin, who later became NASA administrator. I actually realized in the course of this that my original premise was wrong, that America actually has plenty of will to go to Mars, but it just needs a way to go to Mars that is affordable and that doesn't break the budget.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
That was embarrassing. It really was pitiful. I'm not sure most Americans know just how much we were being fleeced. I think they got up to like $90 million a seat. Yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Wow. Yeah. For a seat that cost them like $10 million. That was pre-Doge, obviously.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
It was before SpaceX. But $90 million a seat for a seat that cost them $10 million is high.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
That's a lot of money. Yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
It used to be a sandbar, yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Patents of the week. Patents for those who innovate slowly.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yes. At Tesla, we actually open sourced a lot of patents. So we said our patents are, anyone can use them for free. Really? Yeah. We only do patents at Tesla to avoid patent trolls causing trouble. We'll try to look ahead and say, okay, patent trolls are going to file patents to block certain things. We'll file patents and then open source the patent, make it free.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I mean it when I say patents for the week. Now, there are a few cases in, say, with pharmaceuticals where it might cost you a billion dollars to do a phase three human trial. But then subsequently, the drug is very cheap to manufacture. So cases, there are some, in my opinion, which is massively reduce what can be patented.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Because the whole point of patenting is to maximize innovation, not inhibit it. And in my opinion, maybe a controversial opinion, most patents inhibit innovation, they do not help it. But there are cases, I do want to single out cases like where such as a phase three clinical trial that might cost a billion dollars, but then the drugs thereafter cost a few dollars to manufacture.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
And if you can then immediately copy those drugs for a few dollars, no one will pay for the billion dollars. There's a free rider problem. Free rider problem. Yeah, exactly. So you have to address the free rider problem. But other than that, there should be no patents. The ideas are easy.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
The idea is the easy part. The execution is the hard part. As the old saying goes, it's 1% inspiration, if not less than 1%, and 99% perspiration.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Well, I take a physics first principles approach to everything. It's not as though I wanted to in-source manufacturing. It's just that I was unable to outsource it effectively. So the idea at the beginning of Tesla was that we would outsource almost all the manufacturing, but then it turned out there were no good companies to outsource manufacturing to, which really wasn't feasible.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Outsource manufacturing actually is the exception of the rule. And just over time, we had to insource almost everything for Tesla and same for SpaceX. I became very good at manufacturing because I had to. There was no choice. At this point, I might know more about manufacturing than any human ever has because I've manufactured so many different things in so many different arenas.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I think probably more than anyone ever has.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
About six hours on average.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I work almost every waking hour.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I don't have social dinners, really.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yeah, I literally just thought I'll have lunch and then abroad during meetings and continue meeting.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Well, I guess it started out, even with the first company, Zip2, which is a terrible name, but the first internet company, we were able to rent an office, which was like in a leaky attic, essentially, for $500 a month. And the cheapest apartment we could find was $800 a month. And we only had about $5,000 between my brother and I. So we're not... We'll just stay in the office.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
So we got some couches that converted into beds and we'd kind of sleep at night and then we'd just have to turn the beds back into couches before anyone came. And then we'd shower at the YMCA down the road. And so that literally was for several months what we did. I was in great shape, you know, working out at the Y. I still remember that YMCA at Page Mill Al Camino in Palo Alto.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
So it's been, I don't know, I've never thought to count it, but several hundred days maybe, I don't know.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I think if someone is a sovereign head of a country, they're de facto richer by a lot. Do you still sleep at the office now? I've sometimes slept at the office, yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
29?
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yes. And I don't think it's more than two to four years beyond that.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yes. Best case would be 29.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I don't think we're going to find aliens. Okay. But do we find ruins? Do we find remnants? We may find the ruins of a long dead alien civilization. That's possible. And we may find subterranean microbial life. That's possible.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Remains to be seen. I'm not sure. The important thing is that... We build a self-sustaining city on Mars as quickly as possible. The key threshold is when that city can continue to grow, continue to prosper, even when the supply ships from Earth stop coming. At that point, even if something would happen on Earth, it might not be World War III, but it might be that... A bad virus.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yeah, it might not be anything. I was saying, say civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. It may be that civilization dies with a whimper rather than a bang and simply loses the ability to send ships to Mars. So you obviously need Mars to become self-sustaining and be able to grow by itself before the resupply ships from Earth stop coming.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
That is the critical civilizational threshold beyond which the probable lifespan of civilization is much greater.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I think it can be done in 20 years.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
What are the big technologies we don't have? A few people running around the surface in a hostile environment is not going to make it self-sustaining. So you're going to need on the order of a million people, maybe a million tons of cargo.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yes.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Well, you need to recreate the entire base of industry of Earth. So we're here at the top of a massive pyramid of industry that starts with mining a vast array of materials, those materials going through hundreds of steps of refinement. We grow food, obviously. We grow trees. We make things out of the trees. You've got to build all that on Mars. And Mars is a hostile environment.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
You know, it sometimes gets above zero on a warm summer day near the equator on Mars. Really, it's quite cold.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Well, in the beginning on Mars, you have to have a life support habitation module. You can't just live outdoors. You can't breathe the air.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yeah. Glass domes type of thing.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Uh, what might be Arcadia planetare, um, is one of the, one of the good options. That's, uh, one of my daughters is named Arcadia after that.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
My eldest son's middle name is, uh, Ari's Mars.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
If you're naming your kids around it, my eldest kid is middle name is essentially Mars.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
It's 20 now, 2021 soon.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
No. No, I read a lot of science fiction books and programmed computers. But the first, finally, the first video game that I sold was a space video game called Blastar. Maybe I was born this way.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Well, I suppose I have a philosophy of curiosity. I want to find out the nature of the universe, understand the universe. And in order to do that, we have to travel to other planets, see other star systems, maybe other galaxies. Find perhaps other alien civilizations or at least the remnants of alien civilizations.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Gain a better understanding of where is this universe going, where did it come from? And what questions do we not yet know to ask about the answer that is the universe?
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Yeah, so I studied physics and economics in college, which is a good foundation for understanding how the economy works and how reality works. And then I was going to do a PhD at Stanford in advanced ultracapacitors, actually, as a potential means of energy storage for electric transport. Put that on hold to start an internet company.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
I essentially came to the conclusion that the internet was one of those rare things and I could either watch it happen while a grad student or participate. And I figured I'd always go back to grad school. Grad school's going to be kind of the same. But I couldn't bear the thought of just watching the internet happen. So I wanted to be a part of building it.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
So I created an internet internet company. We did the first maps, directions, yellow pages, white pages on the internet. I actually wrote the first version of the software just by myself in 95. We ended up selling that to Compaq, Texas company, I guess, for about $300 million in cash about four years after I graduated. Wow.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
So I should say, just to preface that, I graduated with about $100,000 in student debt. So it wasn't... Yeah, you and me both.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Where's my $300 million? I know. And when I first arrived in North America, I arrived with $2,500, a bag of books and a bag of clothes.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Well, I got $21 million, blackjack. But I wanted to do more on the internet. So I started a company called x.com, which merged with a company called Confinity, which is Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. And the combined company was actually at first still called x.com, but we later changed the name of the company to PayPal. Because of all the name changes, it's kind of confusing.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
But the company that people know as PayPal today was actually, I filed those incorporation documents for that company. Interesting. Yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
uh yeah yeah and now obviously peter was involved in a coup uh you know we had a little sort of knifing in the senate situation uh where um uh you know that they did crew me at at paypal um i kind of now did you all make peace after that yeah yeah yeah I mean, I was doing a lot of sort of risky moves that I think ultimately would have been successful.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
But I then went on a two-week trip, which was a dual money-raising trip and honeymoon. Because I had not done my honeymoon earlier in the year. So I was raising money while doing a honeymoon. How did that go over, by the way? It worked. It worked. There you go. Kind of worked. I raised money. Yeah. Yeah. And we had a honeymoon. There you go. So, yeah.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Uh, but you don't want to be away from the battle when things are scary. Um, so I was not there to assuage the concerns of the troops. Um, and, um, anyway, uh, we, we passed things up and have been friends, uh, nonetheless. And, um, Yeah, these days I'll like stay at his house and stuff. So obviously we're friends. And he's also invested in most of my companies.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
So I think you have to start with some sort of philosophical premise. In order to be highly motivated, you have to have some philosophical foundation. In my case, it was... that we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of the universe. And in order to expand consciousness, we need to go beyond one planet. If we're on one planet, there's too much risk.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
Hopefully, Earth civilization prospers very far into the future, but it may not. There's always some risk that we are... we self-annihilate through nuclear war or that there's a big meteor that takes us out like the dinosaurs. There's always some risk if all your eggs are in one basket, so it's going to be better if we're a multi-planet species.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
And then once we're a multi-planet species, the next step would be to be multi-stellar and have civilization on many different star systems.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Part 2: Elon Musk 1-on-1 Exclusive at the White House-DOGE, AI, Trump, Mars & Killer Robots
so in 2001 i didn't think that i could i didn't think i could sell rock company so i i thought i'd take some of the money from um paypal and that case i think was about 180 million dollars after tax i have something like that and i thought you know i don't need 180 million dollars so i'll spend a bunch of it on uh a philanthropic maz mission to get the public excited about going back to Mars.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Elon Musk, bitte sagen Sie ein paar Worte. Danke, Herr Präsident.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Ich muss mich einfach für ein paar Tech-Supporte hier befassen, denn das ist eigentlich, wie verrückt es klingt, das ist fast die literäre Verschmutzung der Arbeit, die das Doge-Team macht. Sie helfen, die Computer-Systeme zu fixieren. Viele dieser Systeme sind extrem alt, sie kommunizieren nicht, es gibt viele Fehler in den Systemen, die Software funktioniert nicht.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Wir sind also tatsächlich Tech-Supporte. Es ist ironisch, aber es ist wahr. Das gesamte Ziel hier mit dem Doge-Team ist es, die ungewöhnlichen Herausforderungen zu beantworten. Das ist nicht ein optionales Ding, es ist ein essentielles Ding. Das ist der Grund, warum ich hier bin. Ich nehme viel Platz und bekomme viele Todesfälle. But if we don't do this, America will go bankrupt.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
That's why it has to be done. I'm confident at this point, knock on wood, knock on my wooden head, that we can actually find controlling dollars in savings. Das wäre rund 15 Prozent des 7-Trillionen-Dollar-Budgets. Und das kann nur mit der Unterstützung von allen in diesem Raum gemacht werden. Und ich möchte alle dafür danken. Vielen Dank. Das kann nur mit Ihrem Unterstützung gemacht werden.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Also das ist wirklich eine Unterstützungspunktion für den Präsidenten und für die Organisationen und Departementen, um diese Erhöhungen zu erreichen. Und um effizient 15 Prozent in Reduktion, Verbrauch und Waste zu finden. Und wir bringen die Rechte. Einige Leute sagen, ist das wirklich so? Geht einfach auf doge.gov. Wir haben ein Stück für ein Stück. Wir spezifizieren jedes Stück.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Und ich sollte sagen, wir werden auch Fehler machen. Wir werden nicht perfekt sein. Aber wenn wir Fehler machen, werden wir es sehr schnell lösen. So for example with USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
If we are to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026, it requires saving four billion dollars per day, every day, from now through the end of September. Aber wir können es tun und wir werden es tun.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Ich mache das. Jesse, es gibt weit über, das wird dich krank machen, 200 Gefangene, 200. Also wir haben, weit über, über 250 tatsächlich. Also wir müssen sicher machen, dass ihre Identität geschützt wird und ihre persönliche Information. Aber außer dem, denke ich, morgen, die persönliche Information von Gefangenen.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Außer dem, denke ich, morgen, Jesse, breaking news right now, you're going to see some Epstein information being released. What kind?
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
What you're going to see hopefully tomorrow is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information. But it's pretty sick what that man did.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
Along with his co-defendant.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus Pod: Draining the Swamp: Trump's Federal Layoffs, Epstein Files & Transparent Cabinet
He sure did.
WSJ What’s News
Tesla Rises as Musk Signals DOGE Work ‘Mostly Done’
And I think starting probably in next month, May,
WSJ What’s News
Tesla Rises as Musk Signals DOGE Work ‘Mostly Done’
That's probably... around the middle of next year, second half of next year. And then once it does start to move the financial needle in a significant way, it will really go exponential from there.
WSJ What’s News
Two Rulings Deal Blow to Key Trump Policies
The reason I'm here is because I'm very worried about America going bankrupt due to the corruption and waste. And if we're going to do something about it, the ship of America is going to sink. And we're all on that ship.