马斯克在 TED2022 现场谈 Twitter、Tesla 与大脑运作

0:02Hello. So, in just a few minutes Elon Musk will be joining us here live on stage for a conversation. Rumor has it, there are a few things to talk about with him. We will see. But before that, I just want to show you something special. I want you to come with me to Tesla's huge Gigafactory

0:33in Austin, Texas. So the day before it opened last week, the evening before, I was allowed to walk around it, no one else there. And what I saw there was honestly pretty mind-blowing. This is Elon Musk's famous machine that builds the machine. And his view, the secret to a sustainable future, is not just making an electric car, It's making a system that churns out huge numbers of electric cars with a margin so that they can fund further growth.

1:04When I was there, none of us knew whether Elon would actually be able to make it here today, so I took the chance to sit down with him and record an epic interview. And I just want to show you a nine-minute excerpt of that interview. So here from Austin, Texas, Elon Musk. Want us to switch now to think a bit about artificial intelligence.

1:27I'm curious about your timelines and how you predict and how come some things are so amazingly on the money and some art. So when it comes to predicting sales of Tesla vehicles, for example, I mean, you kind of been amazing. I think in 2014, when Tesla had sold that year 60,000 cars,

1:46you said 2020, I think we will do half a million a year. Yeah, we did all this exactly half a million. Five years ago, last time you came to town, I asked you about full self-driving. And you said, yep, this very year, I am confident that we will have a car going from LA to New York without any intervention. Yeah, I don't want to blow your mind, but I'm not always right.

2:12But so talk about what's the difference between those two? Why has full self-driving in particular have been so hard to predict. I mean, the thing that really got me and I think it's going to get a lot of other people is that there are just so many false storms with self-driving where you think you've got the problem,

2:32have a handle on the problem, and then it, nope, turns out you just hit a ceiling. And because if you were to plot the progress, the progress looks like a log curve. So it's like a series of log curves. So most people don't want to log curve business, but. It goes up sort of a fairly straight way.

2:57And then it starts tailing off. And you start. And there's a kind of ocean. And diminishing returns. In retrospect, they seem obvious. But in order to solve full self-driving properly, you actually just, you have to solve real world AI. You know, because you say like, what are the road networks designed to work with?

3:16The designs work with a biological neural net, our brains, and with vision, our eyes. And so in order to make it work with computers, you basically need to solve real world AI and vision. because we need cameras and silicon neural nets in order to have self-driving work for a system that was designed for eyes and biological neural nets.

3:52I guess when you put it that way, it's sort of like quite obvious that the only way to solve for self-driving is to solve real world AI and sophisticated vision. What do you feel about the current architecture? Do you think you have an architecture now where there is a chance for the logarithmic curve, not to tell off any time soon.

4:12Well, I mean, admittedly these may be an infamous last words, but I actually am confident that we will solve it this year. That we will exceed, so you say like the probability of an accident, what points do you exceed that of the average person? I think we will exceed that this year.

4:31We could be here talking again in a year. It's like, well, another year went by and it didn't happen. But I think this is the year. Is there an element that you actually deliberately make aggressive prediction timelines to drive people to be ambitious? Without that, nothing gets done.

4:48So it feels like at some point in the last year, seeing the progress on understanding that the Tesla AI, understanding the world around it, led to a kind of an aha moment, it has to. Because you really surprised people recently when you said, probably the most important product development going on at Tesla this year is this robot optimist.

5:13Is it something that happened in the development of full self-driving that gave you the confidence to say, you know what, we could do something special here? Yeah, exactly. So it took me a while to realize that in order to solve self-driving, you really needed to solve real world AI.

5:31And the point of which you saw real world AI for a car, which is really a robot on four wheels, you can then generalize that to a robot on legs as well. The things that are currently missing are enough intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things without being explicitly instructed.

5:53So the missing things are basically real world intelligence and scaling up manufacturing. Those are two things that Tesla is very good at. And so then we basically just need to design the specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for a human-wide robot. People have no idea.

6:12This is going to be bigger than the car. But so talk about, I think the first applications you've mentioned are probably going to be manufacturing. But eventually the vision is to have these available for people at home. If you had a robot that really understood the 3D architecture of your house and knew where every object in that house was or was supposed

6:38to be and could recognize all those objects. That's kind of amazing, isn't it? The kind of thing that you could ask a robot to do would be what? Like tidy up. Yeah, absolutely. Or make dinner, I guess, more the lawn. Take a cup of tea to grandma and show her family pictures. Exactly, take care of like grandmother and make sure you're exactly.

7:04And it could recognize, obviously recognize everyone in the home. Could play catch with your kids. Yes. I mean, obviously we need to be careful if this doesn't become a dystopian situation. Like, I think one of the things that's going to be important is to have a localized ROM chip on the robot

7:22that cannot be updated over the air, where if you, for example, would it say stop, stop, stop, that would, if anyone said that, then the robot would stop, you know, type of thing. And that's not updateable remotely. I think it's gonna be important to have safety futures like that.

7:37Yeah, that sounds wise. And I do think they should be a regular career, since for many years. I don't love being regulated, but I think this is an important thing for public safety. And do you think there will be basically, like say, say 2050 or whatever, that like a robot in most homes is what they will be

7:55and people will probably love them and count on them. You'll have your own butler, basically. Yeah, you'll have your sort of buddy robot, probably. Yeah. I mean, how much of a buddy, do you, like, do you have any applications you thought is there, you know, can you have a romantic partner, a sex partner?

8:10I mean, a lot of money out there. It's probably inevitable. I mean, I did promise the internet that I'd make catgirls who could make a robot catgirl. I mean I'm trying to say that, you know. So yeah I guess it will be what whatever people want really, you know. What sort of timeline should we be thinking about of the first models that are actually

8:36made and sold? Well, you know the first, you know, that we tend to make art for jobs that are dangerous and things that people don't want to do. And, you know, I think we'll have, like, an interesting prototype sometime this year. We might have something useful next year, but I think quite likely within at least two years.

8:59And then we'll see rapid growth year over year of the usefulness of the human-wide robots at decreasing costs and scaling up production. How are we on the economics of this? So what do you picture the cost of one of these being? Well, I think the cost is actually not going to be crazy high.

9:15like less than a car. Yeah, but think about the economics of this. If you can replace a $30,000, $40,000 a year worker, which you have to pay every year, with a one-time payment of $25,000 for a robot that can work longer hours, doesn't go on vacation, and it could be a pretty rapid replacement of certain types of jobs.

9:42How worried should the world be about that? I wouldn't worry about the sort of putting people out of a job thing. I think we're actually going to have and already do have a massive shortage of labor. So I think we will have not people out of work but actually still a shortage of labor even

10:03in the future. But this really will be a world of abundance. Any goods and services will be available to anyone who wants them. It'll be so cheap to have goods and services. It'll be ridiculous. So that is part of an epic 80-minute interview, which we are releasing to people, members of TED 2022,

10:35right after this conference. You should be able to look at it on the TED Live website. There's public interest in it. We're putting that out to the world on Sunday afternoon, I think, Sunday evening. but if you're into this kind of stuff, definitely a good thing to do over the weekend.

10:54Now then, hearing from Elon Live, there's huge public interest in that. We have opened up this segment to live stream. And so we're joined right now by, I think, quite a few people around the world. Welcome to Vancouver, welcome to TED22. You're joining us in the last day of our conference here in a packed theater.

11:16And we've been hearing all week from people with dreams about what the next era of humanity is going to be. And now, arguably, the biggest visionary of them all. Elon Musk. Hey. Elon, welcome. So, Elon, a few hours ago, you made an offer to buy Twitter. Why? How'd you know? A little bird tweeted in my ear or something.

12:08I don't know. Have you seen the movie Ted About the Bear? I have. It's a good movie. It's not yet. So yeah, yeah. So, was there a question? Why make that offer? So, well, I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech where, oh, yeah. Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square.

12:47So it's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law. And so one of the things that I believe Quater should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to people's tweets, if they're emphasized or de-emphasized, that action

13:16should be made apparent so anyone can see that action has been taken. So there's no sort of behind the scenes manipulation either algorithmically or manually. But last week when we spoke, Elon, I asked you whether you were thinking of taking off. You said no way. You said, I do not want to own Twitter.

13:39It is a recipe for misery. Everyone will blame me for everything. What on earth changed? No, I think everyone will still blame me for everything. Yeah. If something, if I acquire a Twitter and something goes wrong, it's my fault, 100%. I think there will be quite a few arrows, yes.

13:57It will be miserable, but you still want to do that. I mean, I hope it's not too miserable, but I just think it's important to the funk. It's important to the function of democracy. It's important to the function of the United States as a free country and on many other countries and to help actually to help freedom in the world, more broadly than the US.

14:26And so I think it's, I think the risk, the civilizational risk is decreased if Twitter, the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform. And so I do think this will be somewhat painful and I'm not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it. And I should also say the intent is to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the

14:58law in a private company which I think is run 2000 or so. So it's definitely not from the standpoint of let me figure out how to monopolize it. maximize my ownership of Twitter, but we'll try to bring along as many shoulders as we are allowed to. You don't necessarily want to pay out $40 or whatever it is billion in cash.

15:17You would like them to come with you. I mean, I could technically afford it. I have that. But what I'm saying is this is not a way to sort of make money. I think this is, it's just that I think this is, this could, my strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted

15:48and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. But you've described yourself. I don't care about the economics at all. Okay, that's core to here. This is not about the economics. It's for the moral good that you think will achieve. You've described yourself, Elon, as a free speech absolutist.

16:11But does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay? Well, I think, obviously, Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. So, obviously, there are some limitations on free speech in the US, And of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules.

16:39So you can't incite people to violence. Like a direct incitement to violence. You can't do the equivalent of crying fire in a movie theater, for example. No, that would be a crime. Right. It should be a crime. But here's the challenge. It's such a nuanced difference between different things.

17:00So there's incitement to violence. That's a no if it's illegal. There's hate speech, which some forms of hate speech are fine. I hate spinach. Maybe if it's a sauteed and a cream source, it can be quite nice. But the problem is, so let's say someone says, OK, here's one tweet. I hate politician X. Next tweet is, I wish politician X wasn't alive,

17:30as some of us have said about Putin right now, for example. So that's legitimate speech. Another tweet is, I wish PolyticianX wasn't alive with a picture of their head, with a gun sight over it. Or that plus their address. I mean, at some point, someone has to make a decision as to which of those is not OK.

17:52Can an algorithm do that? Or surely you need human judgment at some point? No, I think the, like I said, in my view, Twitter should match the laws of the country, and really there's an obligation to do that. But going beyond that and having it be unclear who's making what changes to where, having tweets sort of mysteriously be promoted and demoted with no insight into what's going on, having a black box algorithm promote some things and other things, I think this can be quite dangerous.

18:36So the idea of opening the algorithm is a huge deal, and I think many people would welcome that, of understanding exactly how it's making the decision. And critique it. And critique it. Like I mean, I think the code should be on GitHub, you know? So people can look through it and say, I see a problem here.

18:57I don't agree with this. They can highlight issues. Suggest changes in the same way that you sort of update Linux or or signal or something like that, you know But as I understand it Like at some point right now What the algorithm would do is it would look at for example how many people have flagged a tweet as obnoxious

19:19and then At some point a human has to look at it and make make a decision as to does this cross the line or not But that the algorithm itself can't I don't think yet tell the difference between legal and okay and definitely obnoxious. The question is, which humans make that call?

19:39Do you have a picture of that? Right now, Twitter and Facebook and others, they've hired thousands of people to try to help make wise decisions. The trouble is that no one can agree on what is wise. How do you solve that? Well, I think we would want to err on this. If in doubt, let the speech let it exist.

20:03If it's a gray area, I would say let the tweet exist. But obviously, in a case where there's perhaps a lot of controversy that you would not want to necessarily promote that tweet. So I'm not saying this is the, I have all the answers here. But I do think that we wanna be just very reluctant

20:34to delete things and have just be very cautious with permanent bans, you know, timeouts I think are better than permanent bans. And just in general, like I said, It won't be perfect, but I think we wanted to really have, like I said, the perception and reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible.

21:05And a good sign as to whether there's free speech is someone you don't like allowed to say something you don't like. And if that is the case, then we have free speech. And it's dev annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like. That is a sign of a healthy, functioning, free speech situation.

21:31So I think many people would agree with that. And look at the reaction online. Many people are excited by you coming in and the changes you're proposing. Some of this are absolutely horrified. Here's how they would say it. They would say, wait a sec. We agree that Twitter is an incredibly important town square.

21:46It is where the world exchanges opinion about life and death matters. How on earth could it be owned by the world's richest person? I can't be right. So how do you, I mean, what's the response there? Is there any way that you can distance yourself from the actual decision making that matters on content in some very clear way that is convincing to people?

22:10Well, like I said, I think the, it's very important that the algorithm be open sourced and that any manual adjustments be identified. like, so if somebody did something to a tweet, it's, there's information attached to it that that action was taken. And I would personally be, you know, in their editing tweets.

22:36But you'll know if something was done to promote demo or otherwise affect a tweet. You know, as for media sort of ownership, I mean you've got, you know, Mark Zuckerberg owning Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and with a share ownership structure that will have Mark Zuckerberg the 14th still controlling those entities.

23:04So, like literally. Well certainly the- We want to have that at Twitter. If you commit to opening up the algorithm, that definitely gives some level of confidence. So talk about some of the other changes that you've proposed. So the edit button, that's definitely coming. If you have your way.

23:28Yeah. And how do you? I mean, I think, I mean, frankly, the top priority I have, I would have is eliminating

23:42the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. I think these fun influence, they make the product much worse. If I had a Dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we'd have more, about $100 billion Dogecoin.

24:13Do you regret sparking a sort of storm of excitement over Doge and you know where it's gone or? I mean, I think Doge is fun and you know, I've always said don't bet the farm and Dogecoin I think I think it's it's I like dogs and I like memes and it's got both of those and But just on the on the edit button How do you get around the problem of, so someone tweets Elon Rocks, and it's tweeted by two million people.

24:45And then after that they edit it, so Elon sucks. And then all those retweets, they're all embarrassed. And how do you avoid that type of changing of meaning so that retweaters are exploited? Well, I think you'd only have the edit capability for a short period of time. and probably the thing to do upon the edit would be to zero out or re-tweets and favorites.

25:14Okay. I'm open to ideas though, you know. So in one way the algorithm works kind of well for you right now. I just wanted to show you this. So this is a typical tweet of mine, kind of lame and wordy and whatever. And look at the amazing response it gets is this. Oh my god, 97 likes.

25:37And then I tried another one, and 29,000 lights. So the algorithm at least seems to be at the moment, you know, if Elon Musk expands to the world immediately. Not bad, right? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's cool. I mean, you've, but you've, so help us understand how it is you've built this incredible following

26:08on Twitter yourself when, I mean, some of the people who love you the most look at some of what you tweet and they think it's somewhere between embarrassing and crazy, some of it's amazing. I mean, it's a little, but it's, is that actually why it's worked or why is it worked? I mean, I'm tweeting more or less stream of consciousness.

26:34It's not like, let me think about some grand plan about my Twitter or whatever. I'm literally on the toilet or something. I'm like, this is funny. And then tweet that out. That's like most of them. You know, oversharing. But you are obsessed with getting the most out of every minute of your day.

26:55And so, why not? You know, so, I don't know, I just like try to tweet out like things that are interesting or funny or, you know, and then people seem to like it. So if you are unsuccessful, actually, before I ask that, let me ask this. In fact, I don't, yeah, so how can I say, is funding secured?

27:24I have sufficient assets to complete the, it's not a forward looking statement blah blah blah. But I have to, I mean I can do it if possible. Right. So, and I'm actually actually even in the, originally of the, with Tesla back in the day, the funding was actually secured. I want to be clear about that.

27:52In fact, this may be a good opportunity to clarify that. If funding wasn't being secured, and I should say, like, why do I not have respect for the SEC in that situation? And I don't mean to blame everyone at the SEC, but certainly the San Francisco office. It's because the SEC knew that funding was secured.

28:15But they pursued an active public investigation, nonetheless. At the time, Tesla was in a precarious financial situation. And I was told by the banks that if I did not agree to settle with the SEC, that the banks would cease providing working capital and Tesla would go bankrupt immediately.

28:32So that's like having a gun to your child's head. So I was forced to concede to the SEC, unlawfully, those bastards. Now, it makes it look like I lied when I did not in fact lie. I was forced to admit that I lied to save Tesla's life, and that's the only reason. Given what's actually happened to Tesla since then, though, aren't you glad that you didn't take it private?

29:07Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to put yourself in the position at the time. The Tesla was under the most relentless short seller attack in the history of the stock market. The best thing called short and distort, where the barrage of negativity that Tesla was experiencing from short sellers in Wall Street was beyond all belief.

29:29Tesla was the most shorted stock in the history of stock markets. This is saying something. So this was affecting our ability to hire people. It was affecting our ability to sell cars. was terrible. They wanted Tesla to die so bad they could taste it. Well, most of them have paid the price. Yes. Where are they now?

30:02So that was a really strong statement. Obviously a lot of people who support you, I would have you have so much to offer the world on the upside, on the vision side. Don't waste your time getting distracted by these battles that bring out negativity and make people feel that you're being defensive or that people don't like fights,

30:22especially with powerful government authorities. They'd rather buy into your dream. Aren't you encouraged by people just to edit that temptation out and go with the bigger story? Well, I mean, I would say, like, you know, I'm sort of a mixed bag, you know? I mean, what? Well, you're a fighter, and you don't like to lose.

30:56And you are determined that you don't, basically. I mean, you are. Sure, I don't like to lose. I'm not sure many people do. But the truth matters to me a lot. that really pathologically it matters to me. OK, so you don't have to lose. If in this case you are not successful in the board,

31:17does not accept your offer, you've said you won't go higher. Is there a plan B? There is. I think we would like to hear a little bit about plan B for another time, I think. Another time? All right. I, that's a nice tease. All right, so I would love to try to understand this brain of yours more, Elon.

31:57With your permission, I'd like to just play this. This is the, oh, actually, before we do that, he was one of the thousands of questions that people asked. I thought this was actually quite a good one. If you could go back in time and change one decision you made along the way, do your own edit button, which one would it be and why?

32:15Do you mean like a career decision or something? Just any decision over the last few years, like your decision to invest in Twitter in the first place or your anything? I mean the worst business decision I ever made was not starting Tesla with just JB's travel. By far the worst decision I've ever made is not just starting Tesla with JB.

32:43That's number one by far. All right, so JB Strabble was the visionary co-founder who was obsessed with and knew so much about batteries. And your decision to go with Tesla, the companies it was, meant that you got locked into what you concluded was a weird architecture now. There's a lot of confusion.

33:02Tesla did not exist in any, Tesla was a shell company with no employees, no intellectual property when I invested. But a false narrative has been created by one of the other co-founders, Martin Everhart. And I don't want to get into the end of the nastiness here, but I didn't invest in an existing company.

33:24We created a company. And ultimately, the creation of that company was done by JV and me. And unfortunately, there's someone else, another co-founder who has made it his life's mission to make it sound like he created the company, which is false. Wasn't there another issue right at the heart of the development of the Tesla Model 3, where Tesla almost went bankrupt?

33:51And I think you have said that part of the reason for that was that you overestimated the extent to which it was possible at that time to automate a factory. Huge amount was spent kind of over automating, and it didn't work. And it nearly took the company down. Is that fair? I mean, first of all, it's important to understand

34:16like what Tesla actually accomplished that is most noteworthy. It is not the creation of an electric vehicle or creating an electric vehicle prototype or low volume production of a car. There have been hundreds of car startups over the years, hundreds. And in fact, at one point, Bloomberg counted up the number of electric vehicle startups, and I think they got to almost 500.

34:47So the hard part is not creating a prototype or going into limited production. The absolutely difficult thing, which has not been accomplished by an American car company in 100 years, is reaching volume production without going bankrupt. That is the actual hard thing. The last American company to reach volume production without going bankrupt was Chrysler in the 20s.

35:12And it nearly happened to Tesla. Yes, but it's not like, oh geez, I guess if we'd just done more manual stuff, things would have been fine. Of course not. That is definitely not the case. So we basically messed up almost every aspect of the Model 3 production line from cells to packs

35:37to drive in voters, motors, body line, the paint shop, final assembly, everything. Everything was smised up. And I lived in the Fremont and Nevada factories for three years, fixing that production line, running around like a maniac through every part of that factory, living with the team.

36:10I stepped on the floor so that the team who was going through a hard time could see me on the floor. They knew that I was not in some ivory tower. Whatever pain they experienced, I had it more. And some people who knew you well, actually thought you were making a terrible mistake, that you were driving yourself to the edge of sanity almost.

36:37Yes, true. And that you were in danger of making bad choices. And in fact, I heard you say last week, Elon, that you, because of Tesla's huge value now and the significance of every minute that you spend, that you are in danger of sort of obsessing of it, spending all this time to the point of, to the edge of sanity. That doesn't sound

37:04super wise, isn't there? Like your time, your completely sane, centered, rested time and decision making is more powerful and compelling than that sort of, I can barely hold my eyes open. So surely it should be an absolute strategic priority to look after yourself. I mean, there wasn't any other way to make it work.

37:32There were three years of hell, 17, 18, 18, and 19. With three years, the longest period of excruciating pain in my life, there wasn't any other way. And we barely made it. And we were on the regular edge of the back of the city the entire time. So when you got drunk. I don't like it.

37:55Those were three, so much pain. But it had to be done or tells the word be dead. When you looked around the Gigafactory that we saw images of earlier last week and just see where the company has come, do you feel that this challenge of figuring out the new way of manufacturing that you actually have an edge now that it's that you actually have an edge now, that it's different, that you've figured out how to do this, and from those three years won't be repeated.

38:30You've actually figured out a new way of manufacturing. At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth. It's me that! APPLAUSE Yeah. I can tell you how every damn part in that car is made. Basically, you should just live on the factory, live in the factory for three years.

38:57And... That was nice. That was... For you to know it to something? Someone wants to compose a symphony to that expression of confidence, something like that. I have no idea what that is. Anyway, yeah, every aspect of a car of six weeks this Sunday, I know. I mean, you talk about scale right now.

39:18You're in the middle of writing your new master plan. And you've said that scale is at the heart of it. Why does scale matter? Why are you obsessed with it? What are you thinking? Yeah, well, see, in order to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, there must be scale, because we've got a transition, a vast economy that is currently overly dependent on fossil fuels to a sustainable energy economy, one where the energy is,

39:48yeah, I mean, we've got to do it. So the energy's got to be sustainably generated with wind solar, hydro, geothermal, I'm a believer in nuclear as well I think ever talk about. And then since solar and wind is intermittent you have to have stationary storage batteries and then we're going to transition all transport to electric.

40:17If we do those things we have a sustainable energy future. The faster we do those things, the less risk we put to the environment. So sooner is better. And so scale is very important. It's not about fresh leases, it's about tonnage. What was the tonnage of batteries produced and obviously done in a sustainable way.

40:45And our estimate is that approximately 300 terawatt-hours of battery storage is needed to transition, transport electricity and heating and cooling to fully electric situation. Others may, there may be some different estimates out there, but our estimate is 300 terawatt-hours. Yeah.

41:09So we dug into this a lot in the interview that we had put it last week. And so people can go in and hear that more. I mean the context is that is I think about a thousand times the current install battery has I mean the scale up needed is breathtaking basically yeah and and yeah so so your vision is to commit Tesla to try to deliver on a meaningful

41:30percentage of what is needed yeah and what and call on others to do the rest that this is what this is a task for humanity to massively scale up our response to change the energy grade? Yes, it's like basically how fast can we scale and encourage others to scale to get to that 300 terawatt hour

41:53installed base of batteries. Right. And then of course, there'll be tremendous need to recycle those batteries, which is, and it makes sense to recycle them because the raw materials are like high grade ore. So if people shouldn't think, well, they'd be as big pile of batteries, nothing to get recycled because even a dead battery pack is worth about $1,000.

42:16But this is what's needed for a sustainable energy future. So we're going to try to take a set of actions that accelerate the day of a sustainable energy future sooner. OK. There's going to be a huge interest in your master plan when you publish that. Meanwhile, I would love to understand more what goes on in the sprain of yours, because

42:41it is a pretty unique one. I want to play with your permission this very funny opening from SNL, Saturday Night Live. Can we have the volume there, actually, please? Sorry. It's an honor to be hosting Saturday Night Live. I mean that. Sometimes after I say something, I have to say I mean that.

42:59So people really know that I mean it. That's because I don't always have a lot of international variation in how I speak. Which I'm told makes for great comedy. I'm actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger's to host SNL. And I think you followed that up with...

43:23At least the first person to admit it. The first person to admit it. I mean... So this was a great thing to say. But I would love to understand in how you think of Asperger's. Like whether you can give us any sense of even you as a boy, what the experience was, or as you now understand with the benefit of hindsight.

43:51Can you talk about that a bit? Well, I think everyone's experience is gonna be somewhat different. But I guess for me, the social cues were not intuitive. So I was just very bookish and I didn't understand this. I guess others could sort of intuitively understand what does meant by something.

44:20I would just tend to take things very literally as the words as spoken were exactly what they meant. But then that Turn out to be wrong It's you can't they're not they're not simply saying exactly what they mean. There's all sorts of other things that are meant it took me a while to figure that out

44:38so You know, we'll eat quite a lot so I did I did not have a sort of happy childhood to be frank was quite quite rough and And I read a lot of books, lots and lots of books, and so that, you know, sort of gradually sort of understood more from the books that I was reading and watched a lot of movies.

45:07And you know, just, it took me a while to understand things that most people intuitively understand. So I've wondered whether it's possible that that was in a strange way an incredible gift to you and indirectly to many other people. In as much as brains, you know, are plastic and they go where the action is and if for

45:40some reason the external world and social cues which so many people spend so much time and energy and mental energy obsessing over, if that is partly cut off, isn't it possible that that is partly what gave you the ability to understand inwardly the world at a much deeper level than most people do?

46:01I suppose that's certainly possible. I think there's maybe some value also from a technology standpoint because I found it rewarding to spend all night programming computers just by myself. I think most people, most people don't enjoy typing strange symbols into a computer by themselves all night.

46:24They think that's not fun, but I thought it was, I really liked it. So I just program all night by myself and I found that to be quite enjoyable. But I think that is not normal. I mean, it does, you know, I've thought a lot about, it's a riddle to a lot of people of how you've done this, how you've repeatedly innovated in these different industries.

46:54And it does, you know, every entrepreneur sees possibility in the future and then acts to make that real. It feels to me like you see possibility just more broadly than almost anyone and can connect So you see scientific possibility based on a deep understanding of physics and knowing

47:14what the fundamental equations are, what the technologies are that are based on that science and where they could go, you see technological possibility. And then really unusually, you combine that with economic possibility. Like what it actually would cost, is there a system you can imagine where you could affordably

47:32make that thing? And that sometimes you then get conviction that there is an opportunity here, put those pieces together and you could do something amazing. Yeah, I think one aspect of whatever condition I had was I was just absolutely obsessed with truth, just obsessed with truth.

47:56And so the obsession with truth is why I studied physics because physics attempts to understand the truth of the universe. Physics is just what are the provable truths of the universe, and truths that have predictive power. So for me, physics was a very natural thing to study. Nobody made me study it.

48:23It was intrinsically interesting to understand the nature of the universe. And then computer science or information theory, also to just understand logic and there's an argument that information theory is actually operating at a more fundamental level than even physics. So physics and information theory were really interesting to me.

48:58So when you say truth, I mean, it's not like some people, so it's what you're talking about is the truth of the universe, like the fundamental truth that drives the universe. It's like a deep curiosity about what this universe is, why we're here, simulation, why not? We've got time to go into that.

49:15But I mean, you're just deeply curious about what this is for, what this is, this whole thing. Yes, I mean, I think the why of things is very important. I actually, when I was a young teens, I got quite depressed about the meaning of life. I was trying to understand the meaning of life, looking at reading religious texts and reading books on philosophy.

49:46I got into the German philosophers, which is definitely not wise if you're a young teenager, I have to say. And we went dark, but dark. So much better read as an adult. And then actually I ended up reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is actually a book on philosophy, just sort of disguised as a silly humor book, but actually it's actually

50:14a philosophy book. And Adams makes the point that it's actually the question that is harder than the answer. He sort of makes a joke that the answer is 42. That number does pop up a lot. And 420 is just 10 times 42. Ten times more significant than 42. Okay. there's a triangle with 42 degrees and 269s.

50:46So there's no such thing as a perfect triangle, or is there? But even more important than the answer, is the question. That was the whole theme of that book. It's basically how you see meaning then. It's the pursuit of questions. Yeah, so I have a sort of, you know, a proposal for a worldview or a motivating philosophy,

51:10which is to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. And to the degree that we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, biological and digital, we would be better able to ask these questions, to frame these questions, and to understand why we're here, how we got here, what the heck is going on.

51:34And so that is my driving philosophy is to expand the scope and scale of consciousness that we made better understand the nature of the universe. You know, one of the things that was most touching last week was seeing you hang out with your kids. Here's, if I may... It looks vaguely like a ventriloquist on me there.

51:56I mean, how do you know that's real? So that's X and you know, it was just a delight seeing you hang out with him. What's his future going to be? I mean, I don't mean him personally, but the world he's going to grow up in. What future do you believe he will grow up in? Well, I mean a very digital future.

52:25A different world than I grew up in, that's for sure. But I think we want to obviously do our absolute best to ensure that the future is good for everyone's children. And that the future is something that you can look forward to and not feel sad about. you want to get up in the morning and be excited about the future and we should fight for the things that make us excited about the future.

53:00The future cannot just be that one miserable thing after another, solving one sad problem after another. There have got to be things that get you excited, like you want to live. These things are very important and you should have more of it. And it's not as if it's a done deal, like it's all to play for.

53:20Like the future may be horrible. Still there are scenarios where it is horrible, but you see a pathway to an exciting future, both on Earth and on Mars and in our minds through artificial intelligence and so forth. I mean, in your heart of hearts, do you really believe that you are helping deliver that exciting

53:43future for X and for others. I mean, I'm trying my hardest to do so. I, you know, I love humanity and I think that we should fight for a good future for humanity and I think we should be optimistic about the future and fight to make that optimistic future happen. Gailana, I think that's a perfect place to close this.

54:16Thank you so much for spending time coming here and for the work that you're doing and good luck with finding a wise course through on Twitter and everything else. Give them a must. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was really something. Thank you, now. That was really something.