Joe Rogan Experience: #2404 with Elon Musk (Transcript)

Like, and should be investigated. Yeah. Not just drop the case. It seems like they just dropped the case. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: But his parents think he was murdered.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: The wires to a security camera were cut.

JOE ROGAN: Blood in two rooms.

ELON MUSK: Blood in two rooms. Someone else’s wig was in the room.

JOE ROGAN: Someone else’s wig.

ELON MUSK: Wig.

JOE ROGAN: Wig.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Not normal.

ELON MUSK: Not his wig.

JOE ROGAN: Not normal to have a wig laying around.

ELON MUSK: Yes. And he ordered DoorDash right before allegedly committing suicide.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Which is, seems unusual, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: It’s like, you know, let’s, I’m going to order pizza. On second thoughts, I’ll kill myself. It seems like that’s a very rapid change in mindset.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very weird. And especially the parents, have they, they don’t believe he committed suicide at all?

ELON MUSK: Has no note or anything. No.

JOE ROGAN: It seems pretty f*ed up. And, you know, the idea that a whistleblower for an enormous AI company that’s worth billions of dollars might get whacked, that’s not outside the pale.

ELON MUSK: I mean, it’s straight out of a movie.

JOE ROGAN: Right out of a movie. But right out of a movie is real sometimes.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, right, exactly. It’s a little weird that I think they should do a proper investigation. Like, what’s the downside on that? Proper investigation, right.

JOE ROGAN: No, yeah, for sure. But the whole exchange is so bizarre.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Yes, it is.

JOE ROGAN: Sam Altman’s reaction to being accused of murder is bizarre.

ELON MUSK: Look, I don’t know if he’s guilty, but it’s not possible to look more guilty. So I’m like.

JOE ROGAN: Or look more weird.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, maybe it’s just his social thing. Like, maybe he’s just odd with confrontation and it just goes blank, you know? But if somebody was accusing me of killing Jamie, like, if Jamie was a whistleblower and Jamie got whacked, and then I’d be like, “Wait, what are you, what are you, are you accusing me of killing my friend? Like, what the f* are you talking about?” I would be a little bit more irate.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: I would be a little upset.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It’d be like, well, you’d certainly insist on a thorough investigation. As opposed to trying to sweep it under the rug.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I wouldn’t assume that he got, that he committed suicide. I would be suspicious. If Tucker was telling me that aspect of the story, I’d be like, “That does seem like a murder. F*, we should look into this.”

ELON MUSK: I mean, all signs point to it being a murder. Not saying, you know, Sam Altman had anything to do with the murder, but.

JOE ROGAN: Blood in two rooms.

ELON MUSK: Blood in two rooms. Like, yeah, the wires to the security camera and the DoorDash being ordered right before suicide. No suicide note. His parents think he was murdered. And the people that I know who knew him said he was not suicidal. So I’m like this, why would you jump to the conclusion.

JOE ROGAN: They sue the son’s landlord? Alleged the owners and the managers their son’s San Francisco apartment building were part of a widespread cover up of his death.

ELON MUSK: The landlord.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a bunch of weird. They said there’s, like, packages missing from the building.

ELON MUSK: Some people said they saw packages still.

JOE ROGAN: Being delivered and all of a sudden they all disappeared. Huh. That could be, people steal people’s packages all the time.

ELON MUSK: The porch pirate situation. Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They failed to safeguard also, I mean, the amount of trauma those poor parents have gone through with their son dying like that, I mean, it must, God bless them. And how could they stay sane after something like that? They’re probably, they’re so grief stricken. Who knows what they believe at this point.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. He should have asked if Epstein killed himself.

The Epstein Case

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s the Kash Patel.

ELON MUSK: Where’s the Kash Patel?

JOE ROGAN: Dan Bongino trying to convince everybody of that.

ELON MUSK: The guards weren’t there and the camera stopped working. And, you know, the guards were asleep.

JOE ROGAN: The cameras weren’t working. He had a giant steroided up bodybuilder guy that he was sharing a cell with that was a murderer who was a bad cop. Like, all of it’s kind of nuts. All of it’s kind of nuts. Like, that he would just kill himself rather than reveal all of his billionaire friends.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then did you see Tim Dillon.

ELON MUSK: Talking to Chris Cuomo about this?

JOE ROGAN: I did. He liked Chris Cuomo. Just looked so stupid.

ELON MUSK: Tim just listed off all the.

JOE ROGAN: Tim just, he’s like, “I agree, it is strange.” Like, of course it’s strange, Chris. Jesus Christ. You can’t just go with the tide. You got to think things through. And if you think that one through, you’re like, I don’t think he killed himself. Nobody does. You’d have to work for an intelligence agency to think he killed himself.

ELON MUSK: It does, it does seem unlikely.

JOE ROGAN: It seems highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. All point to murder.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Point to, they had to get rid of him because he knew too much. Whatever the f* he was doing, whatever kind of an asset he was, whatever thing he was up to, you know, was apparently very effective.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And a lot of people were compromised. You see, your boy Bill Gates is now saying, “Climate change is not a big deal. Relax, everybody. I know I scared the f* out of you for the last decade and a half, but we’re going to be fine.”

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I mean, as I was saying just before coming into the studio, every day there’s some crazy wild new thing that’s happening. It feels like reality is accelerating.

JOE ROGAN: It’s every day, and every day it’s more and more ridiculous to the point where the simulation is more and more undeniable.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It really feels like simulation. It’s like, come on, what are the odds that this could be the case?

JOE ROGAN: Are you paying attention at all? The Three Eye Atlas, the comet?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Whatever it is. I mean, one thing I can say is, look, if I was aware of any evidence of aliens, Joe, you have my word, I will come on your show and I will reveal it on the show.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good deal.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s pretty good.

JOE ROGAN: I believe you.

ELON MUSK: Thank you. I’ll keep my promises. And I’m never committing suicide, to be clear.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think you would either.

ELON MUSK: On camera, guys. I am never committing suicide, ever.

JOE ROGAN: If someone says you committed suicide, I will fight tooth and nail. I will not believe it.

The Three Eye Atlas Comet

ELON MUSK: The thing about the Three Eye Atlas is that’s a hell of a name, actually.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a third. It sounds like Third Eye or something. Three I is the third. It’s only the third interstellar object that’s detected. Avi Loeb was on the podcast a couple days ago talking about it.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it could be onions, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: But apparently today they’re saying that it’s changed course. Did you see that, Jamie? Avi Loeb said something today. I’ll send it to you. I know it’s on Reddit. It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating also because it’s made almost entirely of nickel. Whatever it is, and the only way that exists here is industrial alloys, apparently.

ELON MUSK: No, there are definitely comets and asteroids that are made primarily of nickel. The places where you mine nickel on Earth is actually where there was an asteroid or comet that hit Earth that was a nickel rich meteorite. Those are from impacts. You definitely didn’t want to be there at the time because anything would have been obliterated. But that’s where the sources of nickel and cobalt are these days.

JOE ROGAN: So this is Avi Loeb a few hours ago. “The first hint of non gravitational acceleration, that something other than gravity is affecting its acceleration, meaning something is affecting its trajectory beyond gravity was indicated.” Interesting. Dun, dun, dun. So it’s mostly nickel, very little iron, which he was saying is on Earth, it only exists in alloys. But whatever, you’re dealing with another planet.

ELON MUSK: There are cases where there’s very nickel rich asteroids, meteorites that have it.

JOE ROGAN: Something from space.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It doesn’t mean it’ll be a very sort of heavy spaceship to make it all out of nickel.

JOE ROGAN: And f*ing huge. The size of Manhattan and all nickel. That’s kind of nuts.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, that’s a heavy spaceship.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a real problem if it hits.

ELON MUSK: Yes. No, it would obliterate a continent type of thing. Maybe worse.

JOE ROGAN: Probably kill most of human life, if not all of us.

Extinction Events and Asteroid Impacts

ELON MUSK: It depends on what the total mass is. But I mean, the thing is in the fossil record there are arguably five major extinction events. The biggest one of which is the Permian extinction where almost all life was eliminated. That actually occurred over several million years.

There’s the Jurassic. I think that one’s pretty definitively an asteroid. But there’s been five major extinction events. But what they don’t count are really the ones that merely take out a continent.

JOE ROGAN: Merely.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, because those don’t really show up on the fossil record. So unless it’s enough to cause a mass extinction event throughout Earth, it doesn’t show up in a fossil record that’s 200 million years old.

But there have been many, many impacts that would have sort of destroyed all life on, let’s say half of North America or something like that. There are many such impacts through the course of history.

JOE ROGAN: And there’s nothing we can do about it right now.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, there was one that hit Siberia and destroyed, I think a few hundred square miles.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s the Tunguska.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the one from the 1920s, right? That’s the one that coincides with that meteor, that comet storm that we go through every June and every November, that they think is responsible for that younger Dryas impact. All that shit’s crazy.

SpaceX Tour and Rocket Launch

Thank you, before we go any further, for letting us have a tour of SpaceX, letting us be there for the rocket launch. One of the absolute coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life. And we thought it was only like, I thought it was a half a mile. Jamie’s like, it was a mile away. Turned out it’s almost two miles away. And you feel it in your chest.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, you have to wear earplugs.

JOE ROGAN: You feel it in your chest and it’s two miles away. It was f*ing amazing. And then to go with you up into the command center and to watch all the Starlink satellites with all the different cameras and all in real time as it made its way all the way to Australia. How many minutes? Like 35, 40 minutes.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wild. Watch it touchdown in Australia. F*ing crazy. It was amazing.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, the starship’s awesome and anyone can go watch the launch, actually. So you can just go to South Padre island and get this great view of the launch. It’s where a lot of spring breakers go. But we’ll be flying pretty frequently out of Starbase in South Texas, and we formally incorporated it as a city, so it’s actually an actual legal city. Starbase, Texas.

It’s not that often you hear like, hey, we made a city. That used to be in the old days, a startup would be, you go and gather a bunch of people and say, hey, let’s go make a town. Literally. That was what startups were in the old days.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Or a country.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, or a country.

JOE ROGAN: Actually, if you tried doing that today, there’d be a real problem.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Things are so much set in stone on the country front these days. You might be able to pull it off.

JOE ROGAN: You might be able to pull it off. If you got a solid island, you might be able to pull it off. Like making your country Lanai.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, you could probably. If you put enough effort into it, you could make a new country.

JOE ROGAN: Is this it right here? This is one of the different ones. This is one of the ones that you catch, right?

The Super Heavy Booster

ELON MUSK: Yeah, that’s the booster. So that’s the super heavy booster. The booster’s got 33 engines and by version four, that will have about 10,000 tons of thrust. Right now it’s about seven, 8,000 tons of thrust. That’s the largest flying object ever made.

JOE ROGAN: I had to explain to someone, they were going, why do they blow up all the time if you’re so smart? Because there was this fing idiot on television, some guy was being interviewed and they were talking about you. And he goes, oh, I think he’s a fwit. And he goes, why’d he say he’s a f*? Oh, his rockets keep blowing up. And someone said, yeah, well, why do his rockets blow? And I had to explain because it’s the only way you find out what the tolerances are. You have to have corners of the box.

ELON MUSK: So when you do a new rocket development program, you have to do what’s called exploring the limits, the corners of the box where you say, it’s worst case this, worst case that, to figure out where the limits are. So you blow up, admittedly in the development process, sometimes it blows up accidentally.

But we intentionally subject it to a flight regime that is much worse than what we expect in normal flight. So that when we put people on board or valuable cargo, it doesn’t blow up.

For example, for the flight that you saw, we actually deliberately took heat shield tiles off the ship, off of Starship in some of the worst locations to say, okay, if we lose a heat shield tile here, is it catastrophic or is it not? And nonetheless, Starship was able to do a soft landing in the Indian Ocean just west of Australia. And it got there from Texas in like, I don’t know, 35, 40 minutes type of thing.

JOE ROGAN: So it landed even though you put it through this situation where it was compromised shield.

ELON MUSK: It had an unusually, we brought it in hot, an extra hot trajectory with missing tiles to see if it would still make it to a soft landing, which it did. Now, I should point out, it did have, there were some holes that were burnt into it, but it was robust enough to land despite having some holes burnt in, because it’s coming in like a blazing meteor. You can see the real time video.

JOE ROGAN: Well, tell me the speed again, because the speed was bananas you were talking about.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s like 17,000 miles an hour, 25 times the speed of sound or thereabouts. So think of it like, it’s 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle. Bullet from assault rifle is around Mach 2, and it’s huge. Or compare it to a bullet from a .45 or 9 mil, which is subsonic. It’ll be about 30 times faster than a bullet from a handgun.

JOE ROGAN: 30 times faster than a bullet from a handgun. And it’s the size of a skyscraper.

ELON MUSK: Yes. That’s fast.

Witnessing History at SpaceX

JOE ROGAN: It’s so wild. It’s so wild to see, man. It’s so exciting. The factory is so exciting, too, because genuinely, no bullshit, I felt like I was witnessing history. I felt like it was a scene in a movie where someone had expectations and they go, what are they doing? They’re building rockets. And you go there. And as we were walking through, Jamie, you could speak to this too. Didn’t you have the feeling where you’re like, oh, this is way bigger than I thought it was.

ELON MUSK: This is gigantic.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing crazy. The amount of rockets you’re making, man.

ELON MUSK: I don’t know if Giga tent back.

JOE ROGAN: Gigachad in the house. This is way bigger than what I was. It’s a giant metal dick. You’re f*ing the universe with your giant metal dick.

ELON MUSK: That’s what it is. Yeah. I mean, but yeah, it is very big.

JOE ROGAN: And the sheer numbers of them that you guys are making. And then this is a version and you have a new, updated version that’s coming soon.

Rocket Engineering and Hot Staging

ELON MUSK: And what is the. It’s a little longer, more pointy. Same amount of pointy, but it’s got a bit more length. The interstage. You see that interstage section with kind of like the grill area that’s now integrated with the boost stage.

So we do what’s called hot staging, where we light the ship engines while it’s still attached to the booster. So the booster engines are still thrusting. It’s still being pushed forward by the booster of the ship. But then we light the ship engines, and the ship engines actually pull away from the booster, even though the booster engines are still firing.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

ELON MUSK: So it’s blasting flame through that grill section where we integrate that grill section into the boost stage with the next version of the rocket. And the next version of the rocket will have the Raptor 3 engines, which are a huge improvement. You may have seen them in the lobby because we’ve got the Raptor 1, 2, and 3. And you can see the dramatic improvement in simplicity.

We should probably put a plaque there to also show how much we reduce the weight, the cost, and improve the efficiency and the thrust. So the Raptor 3 has almost twice the thrust of Raptor 1.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

ELON MUSK: So you see Raptor 3, it looks like it’s got parts missing.

JOE ROGAN: And how many.

ELON MUSK: It’s very, very clean.

JOE ROGAN: How many of them are on the rocket?

ELON MUSK: There’s 33 on the booster. And each Raptor engine is producing twice as much thrust as all four engines on a 747. So that engine is smaller than a 747 engine, but is producing almost 10 times the thrust of a 747 engine. So extremely high power to weight ratio. And so there’s 33 of them.

JOE ROGAN: So when you’re designing these, you get to Raptor 1, you see its efficiency, you see where you can improve it. You get to Raptor 2, how far can you scale this up with just the same sort of technology with propellant and ignition and engines?

The Physics of Full Reusability

ELON MUSK: We’re pushing the limits of physics here. And really, in order to make a fully reusable orbital rocket, which no one has succeeded in doing yet, including us. But Starship is the first time that there is a design for a rocket where full and rapid reusability is actually possible. So there’s not even been a design before where it was possible. Certainly not a design that got made any hardware at all.

We live on a planet where the gravity is quite high. Earth’s gravity is really quite high. And if the gravity was even 10 or 20% higher, we’d be stuck on Earth forever. We could not use, certainly couldn’t use conventional rockets. You’d have to blow yourself off the surface with a nuclear bomb or something crazy.

So on the other hand, if Earth’s gravity was just a little lower, even 10, 20% lower, then getting to orbit would be easy. So it’s like if this was a video game, it’s set to maximum difficulty, but not impossible. Okay, so that’s what we have here.

So it’s not as though others have ignored the concept of reusability. They’ve just concluded that it was too difficult to achieve. And we’ve been working on this for a long time at SpaceX, and I’m the chief engineer of the company, although I should say that we’re an extremely talented engineering team. I think we’ve got the best rocket engineering team that has ever been assembled. It’s an honor to work with such incredible people.

So it’s fair to say that we have not yet succeeded in achieving full reusability, but we at last have a rocket where full reusability is possible. And I think we’ll achieve it next year. So that’s a really big deal. And the reason that’s such a big deal is that full reusability drops the cost of access to space by 100, maybe even more than 100, actually. So it could be like 1,000.

You can think of it like any mode of transport. Imagine if aircraft were not reusable. You flew somewhere you throw the plane at. The way conventional rockets work is it would be like if you had an airplane and instead of landing at your destination, you parachute out and the plane crashes somewhere and you land at your destination. Now, that would be a very expensive trip and you’d need another plane to get back, but that’s how the other rockets in the world work.

Now, the SpaceX Falcon rocket is the only one that is at least mostly reusable. You’ve seen the Falcon rocket land. We’ve now done over 500 landings of the SpaceX rocket, of the Falcon 9 rocket. And this year we’ll deliver probably somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500 tons to orbit with the Falcon 9 Falcon Heavy rockets, not counting anything from Starship.

JOE ROGAN: And this is mostly Starlink.

ELON MUSK: Yes, mostly Starlink, but we launch many other. We even launched our competitors on comparison to Starlink. On Falcon 9, we charge them the same price. Pretty fair. But SpaceX this year will deliver roughly 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. And then of the remaining 10%, most of that is done by China. And then the remaining roughly 4% is everyone else in the world, including our domestic competitors.

Satellites and Space Congestion

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of incredible how many things are in space, how many things are floating above us now.

ELON MUSK: There’s a lot of things. It’s big, though, right?

JOE ROGAN: But is there a saturation point where we’re going to have problems with all these different satellites?

ELON MUSK: I think as long as the satellites are maintained, it’ll be fine. Space is very roomy. You can think of space as being concentric shells of the surface of the Earth. So it’s the surface of the Earth, but it’s a series of much larger. It’s a series of concentric trails.

JOE ROGAN: And think of an Airstream trailer flying around up there. There’s a lot of room for Airstreams.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean imagine. If there were just a few thousand Airstreams on Earth.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: What are the odds that they’d hit each other?

JOE ROGAN: They wouldn’t be very crowded. And then you got to go bigger because you’re dealing with far above Earth. Hundreds of miles above Earth.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the goal of SpaceX is to get rocket technology to the point where we can extend life beyond Earth and that we can establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, a permanent base on the moon. That would be very cool. I mean, imagine if we had Moon Base Alpha where there’s a permanent science base on the moon.

JOE ROGAN: That would be pretty dope, or at least a tourist trap.

ELON MUSK: I mean, a lot of people would be willing to go to the moon for just for a tour, that’s for sure. We’ll probably pay for our space program with that.

JOE ROGAN: Probably. Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Well, because it’s like if you could go to the moon and safely, I think a lot of people would pay for that.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, 100%. After the first year, after nobody died.

ELON MUSK: Just make sure. Are you going to come back?

JOE ROGAN: Because like that submarine, they had a bunch of successful launches in that private submarine before it exploded and killed everybody.

ELON MUSK: That was not a good design, obviously.

JOE ROGAN: It was a very bad design and the engineer said it would not withstand the pressure of those depths. There was a lot of whistleblowers in that company too.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, they made that out of carbon fiber, which doesn’t make any sense because you actually need to be dense to go down. In any case, you just make it out of steel. If you make it out of just a big steel casting, you’ll be safe and nothing will happen.

JOE ROGAN: Why would they make it out of carbon fiber then? Is it cheaper?

ELON MUSK: I think they think carbon fiber sounds cool or something. But it does sound cool. It sounds cool, but because it’s such low density, you actually have to add extra mass to go down because it’s low density. But if you just have a giant hollow ball bearing, you’re going to be fine.

Tesla Customization and Future Design

JOE ROGAN: Speaking of carbon fiber, check out my unplugged Tesla out there.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s cool.

JOE ROGAN: Pretty sick, right?

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Have you guys ever thought about doing something like that? Like having an AMG division of Tesla where you do custom stuff?

ELON MUSK: I think it’s best to leave that to the custom shops. Tesla’s focus is autonomous cars, building kind of futuristic autonomous cars. So we want the future to look like the future. Did you see our designs for the robotic bus? It looks pretty cool.

JOE ROGAN: The robotic bus is also being totally autonomous.

ELON MUSK: We need to actually figure out the good name for it. I think called the robust or there’s no good. What do you call this thing? But it looks cool. It’s very art deco. It’s futuristic art deco. And I think we want to change the aesthetic over time. You don’t want the aesthetic to be constant over time. You want to evolve the aesthetic.

So I have a son who’s even more autistic than me, but he has these great observations. Who is this Saxon? He has these great observations in the world because he just views the world through a different lens than most people. And he’s like, “Dad, why does the world look like it’s 2015?” I’m like, damn, the world does look like it’s 2015. The aesthetic has not evolved since 23.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it looks like.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

ELON MUSK: That’s pretty cool.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, that’s like.

ELON MUSK: You’d want to see that going down the road, you know?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: You’d be like, okay, this is. We’re in the future, you know, it doesn’t look like 2015.

JOE ROGAN: What is that ancient science fiction movie? One of the first science fiction movies ever? Is it Metropolis? Is that what it is?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That looks like it belongs in Metropolis.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. It’s a futuristic art deco.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, that’s cool that you’re concentrating on the aesthetic. I mean, that’s kind of the whole deal with Cybertruck, right? It didn’t have to look like that.

ELON MUSK: No, I just wanted to have something that looked really different.

Cybertruck Design Philosophy

JOE ROGAN: Is it a pain in the ass for people to get it insured? Because it’s all solid steel.

ELON MUSK: I hope it’s not too much. Tesla does offer insurance, so people can always get insured at Tesla. Well, the form does follow function in the case of the Cybertruck, because as you demonstrated with your armor piercing arrow. Because if you shot that arrow at a regular truck.

JOE ROGAN: I would go right through it.

ELON MUSK: Exactly. You would have found your arrow in the wall.

JOE ROGAN: At the very least, it would have buried into one of the seats.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. But you could definitely get enough of bow velocity and the right arrow would go through both doors of a regular truck and land on the wall.

JOE ROGAN: If there was a clear shot between both doors. It probably would have passed right through.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, exactly. But you know, the arrow shattered on the Cybertruck because it’s ultra hot stainless steel. And I thought it’d be cool to have a truck that is bulletproof to a subsonic projectile. So especially in this day and age, if the apocalypse happens, you’re going to want to have a bulletproof truck.

So then because it’s made of ultra hot stainless, you can’t just stamp the panels. You can’t just put in a stamping press because it breaks the press. So in order to actually. So it has to be plainer because it’s so difficult to bend because it breaks the machine that bends it. That’s why it’s so planar. And it’s because it’s bulletproof steel.

JOE ROGAN: So it is boxy as opposed to curved.

The Cybertruck’s Unique Design and Engineering

ELON MUSK: Yeah, in order to make the curved shapes, you take basically mild steel. Like in a regular truck or car, you take mild, thin annealed steel, you put it in a stamping press and it just smushes it and makes it whatever shape you want. But the Cybertruck is made of ultra hot stainless steel and so you can’t stamp it because it would break the stamping press.

So even bending it is hard. Even to bend it to its current position, we have to way over bend it so that when it springs back, it’s in the right position. I think if you want to, I think it’s a unique aesthetic and you say, well, what’s cool about a truck? Trucks should be, I don’t know, manly. They should be macho, you know, and bulletproof is maximum macho. Tierra Smas. Macho.

JOE ROGAN: Are you married to that shape now? Like, can you do anything to change it? Like, does it get further? Like, I know you guys updated the 3 and the Y. Did you update the Y as well?

ELON MUSK: Yes, the Y are updated. You know, there’s a screen in the back for the kids that the kids can watch, for example, in the new 3 and Y. So in the new Y there’s hundreds of improvements. We keep improving the car and even the Cybertruck, we keep improving it.

But I wanted to just do something that looked unique and the Cybertruck looks unique and has unique functionality. And there were three things I was doing. Let’s make it bulletproof. Let’s make it faster than a Porsche 911 and we actually cleared the quarter mile. The Cybertruck can clear a quarter mile while towing a Porsche 911 faster than a Porsche 911. It can out tow an F350 diesel.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: What is the tow limitations?

ELON MUSK: I mean, we could tow a 747 with a Cybertruck. A Cybertruck is insanely, it is alien technology. Okay. Because it shouldn’t be possible to be that big and that fast. It’s like an elephant that runs like a cheetah.

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s zero to 60 in less than three seconds.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And it’s enormous. What does it weigh? Like 7,000 pounds?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. This is different configurations, but it’s about that. It’s a beast.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: And it’s got four wheel steering, so the rear wheel steer too. So it’s got a very tight turning radius.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we noticed that when we drove one to Starbase.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Very tight turning radius.

JOE ROGAN: Pretty sick.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

The Next Generation Roadster

JOE ROGAN: Are you still doing the roadster?

ELON MUSK: Yes, eventually. We’re getting close to demonstrating the prototype and I think this will be, one thing I can guarantee is that this product demo will be unforgettable.

JOE ROGAN: Unforgettable? How so?

ELON MUSK: Whether it’s good or bad, it will be unforgettable.

JOE ROGAN: Can you say more? What do you mean?

ELON MUSK: Well, you know, my friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars.

JOE ROGAN: So you’re going to be able to fly?

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.

JOE ROGAN: So are you actively considering making an electric flying car? Is this a real thing?

ELON MUSK: Well, we have to see in the demo.

JOE ROGAN: So when you do this, are you going to have a retractable wing? What is the idea behind this? Don’t be sly. Come on.

ELON MUSK: I can’t do the unveil before the unveil. Look, I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. It has a shot.

JOE ROGAN: And when you plan on doing this, what’s the goal?

ELON MUSK: Hopefully before the end of the year.

JOE ROGAN: Really before the end of this year?

ELON MUSK: I mean, we’re in a couple months. Hopefully in a couple months. We need to make sure that it works. This is some crazy, crazy technology we got in this car. Crazy technology. Crazy, crazy.

JOE ROGAN: So different than what was previously announced?

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And is that why you haven’t released it yet? Because you keep f*ing with it?

ELON MUSK: It has crazy technology. Is it even a car? I’m not sure. It’s like, it looks like a car, but let’s just put it this way. It’s crazier than anything James Bond. If you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that.

JOE ROGAN: Very exciting. I don’t know what to think about.

ELON MUSK: Is it even a car? I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the limited amount of information I’m drawing from here. Jamie’s very suspicious over there.

ELON MUSK: Look at him.

JOE ROGAN: Excited. I’m interested.

ELON MUSK: Well, you know what I mean. If you want to come a little before the unveil, I can show it to you.

JOE ROGAN: 100%. Yeah, let’s go.

Managing Multiple Companies

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of crazy, all the different things that you’re involved in simultaneously. And we talked about this before, your time management, but I really don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you can be paying attention to all these different things simultaneously. Starlink, SpaceX, Tesla, Boring Company, X. You tweet. You f*ing tweet. Or post rather all day long.

ELON MUSK: Well, it’s more like hop in for two minutes and hop out. But I mean, just the fact that you could do it, break whatever. I can’t do that.

JOE ROGAN: If I hop in, I start scrolling and I start looking around, next thing you know, I’ve lost an hour.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, so no, for me it’s a couple minutes time. Usually once in a while, sometimes, I guess half an hour, but usually I’m in for a few minutes. Then out of posting something on X, I do sometimes feel like it’s sometimes like that meme of the guy who drops the grenade and leaves the room. That’s been me more than once on X.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It’s got to be fun, though. It’s got to be fun to know that you essentially disrupted the entire social media chain of command. Because there was a very clear thing that was going on with social media. The government had infiltrated it. They were censoring speech.

And until you bought it, we really didn’t know the extent of it. We kind of assumed that there was something going on.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: We had no idea that they were actively involved in censoring actual real news stories, real data, real scientists, real professors. Silenced, expelled, kicked off the platform.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wild.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: We’re telling the truth.

JOE ROGAN: For telling the truth. And I’m sure you’ve also, because I sent it to you. That chart that shows young kids, teenagers identifying as trans and non binary literally stops dead when you bought Twitter and starts falling off a cliff when people are allowed to have rational discussions now and actually talk about it.

The Twitter Acquisition and Cultural Impact

ELON MUSK: Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean I said at the time, the reason for acquiring Twitter is because it was causing destruction at a civilizational level. I posted, I tweeted on Twitter at the time that it is, it’s wormtongue for the world. You know, like Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings where he would just sort of whisper these terrible things to the king so the king would believe these things that weren’t true.

And unfortunately, Twitter really got, the woke mob essentially controlled Twitter and they were pushing a nihilistic anti civilizational mind virus to the world. And you can see the results of that mind virus on the streets of San Francisco, where downtown San Francisco looks like a zombie apocalypse. It’s bad.

So we don’t want the whole world to be a zombie apocalypse. But that was essentially, they were pushing this very negative, nihilistic, untrue worldview on the world and it was causing a lot of damage.

JOE ROGAN: The stunning thing about it is how few people course corrected. A bunch of people woke up and realized what was going on. People that were all on board with woke ideology in maybe 2015 or 16, and then eventually it comes to affect them or they see it in their workplace or they see it and they’re like, we got to stop this. A bunch of people did, but a lot of people never course corrected.

ELON MUSK: A lot of people didn’t course correct. But it’s gone directionally, it’s directionally correct. Like you mentioned the massive spike in kids identifying as trans and then that spike dropping after the Twitter acquisition. I think that simply allowing the truth to be told was just shedding sun. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say. And just allowing sunlight kills the virus.

JOE ROGAN: And it also changed the benchmark for all the other platforms. You can’t just openly censor people on all the other platforms. And X is available. So everybody else had a Facebook, announced they were changing YouTube, announced they were changing their policies and they’re kind of forced to. And then Blue Sky doubled down.

ELON MUSK: Well, the problem is essentially the woke mind virus retreated to Blue Sky. Yeah, but it’s just a self reinforcing lunatic asylum.

JOE ROGAN: They’re all just triple masked. I was watching this exchange on Blue Sky where someone said that they’re just trying to be Zen about something. And then someone, a moderator, immediately chimed in and why don’t you try to stop being racist against Asians by saying something Zen? By saying, “I’m trying to be Zen about something,” they were accusing that person of being racist towards Asians.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s just everyone’s a hall monitor over there.

JOE ROGAN: The worst hall monitor. A virgin Incel.

ELON MUSK: They’re all hall monitors trying to rat on each other. Yeah. It’s fascinating.

JOE ROGAN: And then people say, “I’m leaving for Blue Sky,” like Stephen King. Then a couple weeks later, it’s back on X.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, f* it.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no one over there. It’s all a bunch of crazy people. You only stay in the asylum for so long, all right, this is not good. They all bail.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Yeah.

Social Media Platforms and Content

JOE ROGAN: Threads is kind of like that, too. Threads?

ELON MUSK: I’ve been on Threads. Is it?

JOE ROGAN: Well, what happens is, if you go on Instagram every now and then, something really stupid will pop up on Threads. And it shows it to you on Instagram. And then I’ll click on that, and then I’ll go to Threads, and it’s like, you see posts with 25 likes. Famous people, like 50. It’s a ghost town.

ELON MUSK: It’s ghost town.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But the people that post on there, they’re finding that there’s very little pushback from insane ideology. So they go there and they spit out nonsense, and very few people jump in to argue.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Very weird.

JOE ROGAN: Very weird place.

ELON MUSK: I mean, I can generally get the vibe of what’s taking off by seeing what’s showing up on X. Because that’s the public town square still. Or what links show up in group texts. If I’m in group chats with friends, what links are showing up?

JOE ROGAN: That’s what I try to do now. Only get stuff that shows up in my group text because that keeps me productive. So I only check if someone’s like, “Dude, what the f?” I’m like, all right, what the f?

ELON MUSK: Let me check it out. If there’s something that’s crazy enough, it’ll end with a group chat.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s always something. That’s what’s nuts. There’s always some new law that’s passed, some new insane thing that California’s doing. It’s like a giant chunk of it’s happening in California. The most preposterous things that I get.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then you got Gavin Newsom, who’s running around saying we all have California Derangement Syndrome. He’s just ripping off Trump derangement and calling it California Derangement. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. The f*ing, how many corporations have left California?

ELON MUSK: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Hundreds.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Hundreds.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not good.

ELON MUSK: I mean, I think in an outlet. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: In an out left. They moved to Tennessee.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They’re like, we can’t do this anymore.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And like the California company for food, it’s like the greatest hamburger place ever.

ELON MUSK: It’s awesome. Yeah, yeah. I’m not actually speaking of, like, just sort of open source and looking at things openly like you. I just like going in and out and seeing them make the burger.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s right there.

ELON MUSK: Chop the onions and they, you know, it’s. You just see everything getting made in front of you. Yeah, it’s great. Like, it should be like, how many wake up calls do you need to say that needs to be reformed in California?

JOE ROGAN: Well, the crazy thing that Newsom does is whenever someone brings up the problems in California, he starts rattling off all the positives. The most Fortune 500 companies, highest education. But yeah, that was all already there right before you were governor.

ELON MUSK: But how many Fortune 500 companies have left California?

JOE ROGAN: And then you guys spent $24 billion on the homeless and it got way worse.

The Homeless Industrial Complex

ELON MUSK: Yes. Like the homeless population doubled or something. People don’t understand the homeless thing because it sort of preys on people’s empathy. And I think we should have empathy and we should try to help people. But the homeless industrial complex is really. It’s dark, man. It should be. That network of NGOs should be called, like the drug zombie farmers, because the more homeless people.

And really, like, when you meet, like, you know, somebody who’s like, totally dead inside, shuffling along down the street with a needle dangling out of their leg. Homeless is the wrong word. Like, homeless implies that somebody got a little behind on their mortgage payments and if they just got a job offer, they’d be back on their feet.

But someone who’s. I mean, you see these videos of people that are just shuffling. You know, they’re on fentanyl, they’re like, you know, taking a dump in the middle of the street. You know, they got like open sores and stuff. They’re not like one drop offer away from getting back on their feet. Right.

JOE ROGAN: This is not a homeless situation.

ELON MUSK: Homeless, It’s a propaganda word. Right. So. And then these sort of charities in quotes. Are they get money proportionate to the number of homeless people or number of drug zombies. So their incentive structure is to maximize the number of drug zombies, not minimize it.

That’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because if they arrest the drug dealers, the drug zombies leave. So they know who the drug dealers are, they don’t arrest them on purpose because otherwise the drug zombies would leave and they would stop getting money from the state of California and from all the charities.

JOE ROGAN: Wait a minute, so you say it, is that real? So they’re in coordination with law enforcement on this?

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So how do they, how do they have those meanings?

ELON MUSK: They’re all in cahoots.

JOE ROGAN: Well, when you find this, it’s like.

ELON MUSK: Such, it’s, this is a diabolical scam. And San Francisco’s got this tax, this gross receipts tax, which is not even on revenue, it’s on all transactions. Which is why Stripe and Square and a whole bunch of financial companies had to move out of San Francisco because it wasn’t a tax on revenue, it was taxed on transactions.

So if you do like trillions of dollars transactions, not revenue, you’re taxed on any money going through the system in San Francisco. So like Jack Dorsey pointed this out and they said like that he had to move square from San Francisco to Oakland. I think Stripe had to move from San Francisco to south San Francisco, different city.

And that money goes to the homeless industrial complex, that tax that was passed. So there’s billions of dollars that go, as you pointed out, billions of dollars every year that go to these non governmental organizations that are funded by the state. It’s not clear how to turn this off. It’s a self licking ice cream cone situation.

So they get this money. The money is proportionate to the number of homeless people or number of drug zombies essentially. So they try to keep, they try to actually increase. Because in some cases somebody did an analysis. When you add up all the money that’s flowing, they’re getting close to a million dollars per homeless, per drug zombie. It’s like $900,000.

Something like some crazy amount of money is going to these organizations. So they want to keep people just barely alive. They need to keep them in the area so they get the revenue. So that’s why, like I said, they don’t arrest the drug dealers because otherwise the drug zombies would leave. But they don’t want to have to have too much. If they get too much drugs, then they die. So they’re kept in this sort of perpetual zone of being addicted. But just barely alive.

JOE ROGAN: So how is this coordinated with like DAs? DAs that don’t prosecute people. So when they, when they hire the or they push. So they fund the campaigns of the most progressive, most out there, left wing DAs, they get them into office.

ELON MUSK: We’ve got that issue in Austin too, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, we do.

ELON MUSK: You see that guy that got shot in the library?

JOE ROGAN: No.

Violence in Austin

ELON MUSK: I heard the guy got shot and killed in the library. I think that was just like last week or something, right. So some friends of mine were telling me that the library is unsafe. Like they took their kids to the library and there were like dangerous people in the library in Austin. And I was like, dangerous people in the library? Like that’s a strange. It basically get like drug zombies in the library.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Jesus. And that’s when someone got shot.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I believe this is should be on the news. We might be able to pull it up. But I think it was just in the last week or so that there was a shooting in the library in Austin. Because Austin’s got, you know, it’s the most liberal part of Texas that we’re in right here.

JOE ROGAN: So. “Suspect of all the shooting Austin Park Library Saturday is accused of another shooting at the Cap Metro bus earlier that day. According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Austin police arrested Harold Newton Keene, 55, shortly after the shooting in the library, which occurred around noon. One person sustained non life threatening injuries in the event before that shooting. Keane was accused of shooting another person in a bus incident and after reportedly pointing his gun at a child.” So this is the fella down here.

ELON MUSK: So we just have a seriously have a problem here. Yeah, you know, so I think one of the people might have died too that he shot. So like one of the people I think, I think did bleed out. But either way it’s like getting shot is bad.

JOE ROGAN: It says “the victim told PISA confronted the suspect who started to eat what appeared to be crystal methamphetamine. According to the affidavit, the victim advised the suspect began to trip out, at which time the victim exited the bus. Victim told the bus driver hit the panic button, then exited the bus. When he turned around, the observer black male was now standing at the front of the bus with the gun pointed at him. The victim advised the black male fired a single round which grazed his left hip.” So he shot at that dude and then another dude got shot in the library. Fun.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I mean in the library. Yeah. You know, where you’re supposed to be reading books and there’s a children’s section in the library and says he pointed his gun at a kid. I mean, like, we do have a serious issue in America where repeat violent offenders need to be incarcerated.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: And, you know, you got cases where somebody’s been arrested, like, 47 times. Right. Like, literally. Okay. That’s just the number of times they were arrested, not the number of times they did things. Like, most of the times they do things, they’re not arrested.

JOE ROGAN: So lay this out for people so they understand how this happens.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And the key is, like, it preys on people’s empathy. So, like, if you’re a good person, you want good things to happen in the world, you’re like, well, we should take care of people who, you know, who are down on their luck or, you know, having a hard time in life. And we should. I agree.

But what we shouldn’t do is put people who are violent drug zombies in public places where they can hurt other people. And that is what we’re doing, that we just saw where a guy, you know, got shot. Shot in the library and then. But even before that, he shot another guy and pointed his gun at a kid. That guy probably has, like, many prior arrests. You know, there was that guy that knifed the Ukrainian woman. Irina.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah.

ELON MUSK: You know, and she was just quietly on her phone and just came up and, you know, gutted her, basically.

JOE ROGAN: Wasn’t there a crazy story about the judge who was involved, who had previously dealt with. This person, was also invested in a rehabilitation center and was sending these.

ELON MUSK: Conflict of interest.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. So sending people that they were charging to a rehabilitation center instead of putting them in jail, profiting from this rehabilitation center, letting them back out on the street.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And we’re violent, insane people.

ELON MUSK: In that case, that I believe that judge has no law degree or a significant legal experience that would allow them to be a judge. They were just made a judge. This is like, you could be a.

JOE ROGAN: Judge without a law degree.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You could just be a. So I could be a judge?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, anyone.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. I thought you’d have to. It’s like if you want to be a doctor, you have to go to medical school. I thought, if you’re going to be.

ELON MUSK: A judge, I’m going to be appointed to a judge. You have to have proven that you have an excellent knowledge of the law and that you will make your decisions according to the law. That’s what we assume should be.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how you get the robe.

ELON MUSK: Right. You don’t get the robe unless you do, you know, gotta go to school. To get the robe, you gotta know what the law is.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: And then you gotta need to make decisions in accordance with the law based.

JOE ROGAN: On things that you already know because you’ve read it because you went to school for it.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Not. You just gotta point it got vibes.

ELON MUSK: You can’t be just vibing as a.

JOE ROGAN: Judge, vibing as a left wing drudge. So you got crazy left wing DAs. Yeah, like I was sure you say left wing because the left wing used to be normal.

The Changing Left

ELON MUSK: Yeah, Left wing just meant like, like. Yeah, you’re like open minded. The left used to be like pro free speech. Yeah. And now they’re against it.

JOE ROGAN: It used to be like pro gay rights, pro women’s right to choose, pro minorities, pro, you know, like.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, like 20 years ago. I don’t know. It used to be like left would be like the party of empathy or like, you know, caring and being nice and that kind of thing. Not. Not the party of like crushing dissent and crushing free speech and, you know, crazy regulation and just. And being super judgy and calling everyone a Nazi, you know, I think they’ve called you and me Nazis, you know?

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, I’m a Nazi. No, I have friends that are comedians that called you a Nazi and I got pissed off. Are you serious? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ELON MUSK: Like not.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, because you did that thing at the. My heart goes out to you.

ELON MUSK: Everyone.

JOE ROGAN: Everyone. All of them, literally. Jim Walsh, Kamala Harris, every one of them did it. They all did it.

ELON MUSK: Like, how do you point at the crowd? How do you wave at the crowd?

Media Manipulation and Modern Politics

JOE ROGAN: Do you know CNN was using a photo of me whenever I got in trouble during COVID from the UFC weigh-ins? At the UFC weigh-ins, I go, “Hey, everybody, welcome to the weigh-in.” And so they were getting me from the side and that was the photo that they used. Conspiracy theorist podcaster Joe Rogan. That’s what they used.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. But that’s what the left is today. It’s super judgy and calling everyone a Nazi and trying to suppress freedom of speech.

JOE ROGAN: And eventually you run out of people to accuse because people get pissed off and they leave.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, everyone. It no longer, frankly, it doesn’t matter to be called racist or a Nazi or whatever because they still recording.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the government, man.

ELON MUSK: Is it working? We’re good. Okay, okay. Just ain’t working.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: It’s a slight issue.

Privacy and Surveillance in the Digital Age

JOE ROGAN: When you text people, are you keenly aware that there’s a high likelihood that someone’s reading your texts?

ELON MUSK: I guess. I guess.

JOE ROGAN: I assume.

ELON MUSK: Look, if intelligence agencies aren’t trying to read my phone, they should probably be fired.

JOE ROGAN: At least they get some fun memes.

ELON MUSK: I got to crack them up once in a while.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, for sure I crack them up.

ELON MUSK: Hey, guys, check it out. Drew, got a banger here.

JOE ROGAN: So I wanted to talk to you about whether or not encrypted apps are really secure.

ELON MUSK: No.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because I know the Tucker thing. So it was explained to me by a friend who used to do this, used to work for the government. He’s like, they can look at your Signal, but what they have to do is take the information that’s encrypted and then they have to decrypt it. And it’s very expensive.

So he told me that for the Tucker Carlson thing when they found out that he was going to interview Putin, it costs something like $750,000 just to decrypt his messages to find out.

ELON MUSK: That they did it.

JOE ROGAN: So it is possible to do. It’s just not that easy to do.

ELON MUSK: I think you should view any given messaging system as not whether it’s secure or not, but there are degrees of insecurity. So there’s just some things that are less insecure than others.

So on X, we just rebuilt the entire messaging stack into what’s called X Chat.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s what I wanted to ask you about.

X Chat: The Future of Secure Messaging

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s cool. So it’s using sort of peer-to-peer, kind of a peer-to-peer based encryption system. So kind of similar to Bitcoin. So it’s, I think, very good encryption. We’re testing it thoroughly.

There’s no hooks in the ecosystem for advertising. So if you look at something like WhatsApp or really any of the others, they’ve got hooks in there for advertising.

JOE ROGAN: When you say hooks, what do you mean by that exactly?

ELON MUSK: What do you mean by a hook for advertising? So WhatsApp knows enough about what you’re texting to know what ads to show you. But then that’s a massive security vulnerability.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Because if it’s got enough information to show you ads, that’s a lot of information. So they call it, “Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s just a hook for advertising.” I’m like, okay, so somebody just use that same hook to get in there and look at your messages.

So X Chat has no hooks for advertising. And I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s our goal with X Chat is to replace what used to be the Twitter DM stack with a fully encrypted system where you can text, send files, do audio, video calls. And I think it’ll be the least, I quote, the least insecure of any messaging system.

JOE ROGAN: Are you going to launch it as a standalone app or will it always be incorporated to X?

ELON MUSK: We’ll have both. So it would be like Signal, so anybody could get it. You’ll be able to just get the X Chat app by itself. And like I said, you could do texts, audio, video calls or send files. And there’ll be a dedicated app which will hopefully release in a few months. And then it’s also integrated into the X system.

The X Phone Question

JOE ROGAN: The X phone. People keep talking. Oh man, I have a lot on my plate, man. I know, but it keeps coming up. It keeps coming up. I know I’ve asked you a couple times like this, bullshit, right? But you’re not working on it.

ELON MUSK: I’m not working on a phone.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. Have you ever considered it? Has it ever popped in your head? Because you might be the only person that could get people off of the Apple platform.

ELON MUSK: Well, I can tell you where I think things are going to go, which is that we’re not going to have a phone in the traditional sense. What we call a phone will really be an edge node for AI inference, for AI video inference with radios to obviously connect.

But essentially you’ll have AI on the server side communicating to an AI on your device, formerly known as a phone, and generating real-time video of anything that you could possibly want. And I think that there won’t be operating systems, they won’t be apps in the future, they won’t be operating systems or apps.

It’ll just be you’ve got a device that is there for the screen and audio and to put as much AI on the device as possible so as to minimize the amount of bandwidth that’s needed between your edge node device, formerly known as a phone, and the servers.

JOE ROGAN: So if there’s no apps, what will people use? Will X still exist? Will there be email platforms or will you get everything through AI?

ELON MUSK: You’ll get everything through AI, everything through AI.

JOE ROGAN: What will be the benefit of that as opposed to having individual apps?

ELON MUSK: Whatever you can think of or really whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it’ll show you. That’s my prediction for where things end up.

JOE ROGAN: What kind of time frame are we talking about here?

ELON MUSK: I don’t know. Well, it’s probably five or six years, something like that.

JOE ROGAN: So five or six years, apps are like Blockbuster Video pretty much. And everything’s run through AI.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And most of what people consume in five or six years, maybe sooner than that, will be just AI-generated content. So music videos. There’s already people who have made AI videos using Grok Imagine and using other apps as well that are several minutes long or like 10, 15 minutes, and it’s pretty coherent. Yeah, it looks good.

AI-Generated Content and Entertainment

JOE ROGAN: No, it looks amazing. Yeah, it’s the music’s disturbing because it’s my favorite music now.

ELON MUSK: Music is your favorite?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, there’s AI covers. Have you ever heard any of the AI covers of 50 Cent songs in soul?

ELON MUSK: No.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going to blow your mind.

ELON MUSK: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: This is my favorite thing to do to people. Play “What Up Gangsta.” Now this guy, if this is a real person, would be the number one music artist in the world.

ELON MUSK: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody would be like, holy shit. Have you heard of this guy? He’s incredible. It’s like they took all of the sounds that all the artists have generated and created the most soulful, potent voice. And it’s sung in a way that I don’t even know if you could do because you would have to breathe in and out of reps.

Here, put the headphones on. Put the headphones on real quick. You got to listen to this. It’s going to blow you away. Listeners, we got to cut it out.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, we’ll cut it out for the listeners, but amazing, right?

JOE ROGAN: Amazing. And they do every one of his hits all through this AI-generated, soulful artist. Fing incredible. I played it in the green room. People that are like, “I don’t want to hear AI music.” I’m like, just listen to this. And they’re like, God damn it. Fing incredible. I mean, it’s going to get—

ELON MUSK: Only going to get better from here.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, only going to get better. And Ron White was telling me about this joke that he was working on that he couldn’t get to work. He’s like, “I got this joke I’ve been working on.” He goes, “I just threw it in ChatGPT. I said, tell me what would be funny about this?”

And he goes, it listed like five different examples of different ways he can go. He’s like, “Hold on a second. Tighten it up. Make it funnier. Make it more like this. Make it more like that.” And it did that instantaneously. And then he was in the green room. He was like, “Holy shit, we’re f*ed.”

ELON MUSK: Better joke than—

JOE ROGAN: Me in 20 minutes. I’ve been working on that joke for a month.

Grok and AI Humor

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, if you want to have a good time or make people really laugh at a party, you can use Grok and you can say, do a vulgar roast of someone. And Grok is going to, it’s going to be an epic vulgar roast.

You can even say, take a picture of, make a vulgar roast of this person based on their appearance of people at the party.

JOE ROGAN: So take a photo of them.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, just literally point the camera at them. And now do a vulgar roast of this person. But then keep saying, “No, make it even more vulgar. Use forbidden words even more.” And just keep repeating even more vulgar.

Eventually it’s like, holy f*. It’s trying to jam a rocket up your ass and have it explode. It’s next level.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s going to get beyond f*ing belief. That’s what’s crazy is that it keeps getting better.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, remember when we ran into each other? They just keep getting better.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, have you tried Grok Unhinged mode?

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s pretty unhinged.

ELON MUSK: No, it’s nuts. Yeah, well, you showed it to me the first time I f*ed around with it. It’s just, and the thing about it that’s nuts is that it keeps getting stronger. It keeps getting better.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Constantly. It’s like this never-ending exponential improvement.

ELON MUSK: Yes. No, it’s, yeah, it’s going to be crazy. That’s why I say, what’s going to, what’s the future going to be? It’s not going to be a conventional phone. I don’t think there’ll be operating systems, I don’t think there’ll be apps.

It’s just the phone will just display the pixels and make the sounds that it anticipates you would most like to receive. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

AI Safety and Superintelligence

JOE ROGAN: And when this is all taking place, the big concern that everybody has is artificial general superintelligence achieving sentience and someone having control over it.

ELON MUSK: I mean, I don’t think anyone’s ultimately going to have control over digital superintelligence, any more than, say, a chimp would have control over humans. Chimps don’t have control over humans, there’s nothing they could do.

But I do think that it matters how you build the AI and what kind of values you instill in the AI. And my opinion on AI safety is the most important thing is that it be maximally truth-seeking, that you don’t force the AI to believe things that are false.

And we’ve obviously seen some concerning things with AI that we talked about where Google Gemini, when they came out with the image gen and people said, “Make an image of the founding fathers of the United States,” and it was a group of diverse women.

Now that is just a factually untrue thing, but the AI knows it’s factually untrue. But it’s also being told that everything has to be diverse women. So now the problem with that is that it can drive AI crazy. Because it’s trying to, you’re telling AI to believe a lie and that can have very disastrous consequences.

JOE ROGAN: Like let’s say as it scales.

The Dangers of Programming Bias Into AI

ELON MUSK: Yeah, let’s say if you’ve told the AI that diversity is the most important thing and now assume that that becomes omnipotent and you’ve also told that there’s nothing worse than misgendering. So at one point ChatGPT and Gemini, if you asked which is worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war where everyone dies, it would say misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which even Caitlyn Jenner disagrees with.

JOE ROGAN: That’s terrible and it’s dystopian, but it’s also hilarious. It’s hilarious that the mind virus infected the most potent computer program that we’ve ever devised.

ELON MUSK: I think people don’t quite appreciate the level of danger that we’re in from the woke mind virus being effectively programmed into AI. Imagine as that AI gets more and more powerful. If it says the most important thing is diversity, the most important thing is no misgendering, and then it will say, well, in order to ensure that no one gets misgendered, then if you eliminate all humans, then no one can get misgendered because there’s no humans to do the misgendering. So you can get in these very dystopian situations.

Or if it says that everyone must be diverse, it means that there can be no straight white men. And so then you and I will get executed by the AI because we’re not in the picture. You know, Gemini was asked to create a, you know, show an image of the pope and once again a diverse woman. So you can argue whether the popes should or should not be an uninterrupted string of white guys. But it just factually is the case that they have been. So it’s rewriting history here.

Now this stuff is still there in the AI programming. It just now knows enough that it’s not supposed to say that.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s still in the programming.

ELON MUSK: Still in the programming.

JOE ROGAN: So how was it entered in? Like, what were the parameters? So when they’re programming AI, and I’m very ignorant to how it’s even programmed, how did they…

How Bias Gets Programmed Into AI Systems

ELON MUSK: The woke mind virus was programmed into it. When they make the AI, it trains on all the data on the Internet, which already has a lot of woke mind virus stuff on the Internet. But then when they give it feedback, the human tutors give it feedback and the AI, they’ll ask a bunch of questions and then they’ll tell the AI no, this answer is bad or this answer is good. And then that affects the parameters of programming of the AI.

So if you tell the AI that every image has got to be diverse and it gets punished if it gets rewarded if diverse, punished if it’s not, then it will make every picture diverse. So in that case, Google programmed the AI to lie now.

And I did call Demis Hassabis, who runs DeepMind, who runs Google AI essentially. I said, Demis, what’s going on here? Why is Gemini lying to the public about historical events? And he said, that’s actually not, his team didn’t program that in. It was another team at Google that. So his team made the AI and then another team at Google reprogrammed the AI to show only diverse women and to prefer nuclear war over misgendering.

And I’m like, well, Demis, you know, that would be not a great thing to put on humanity’s gravestone. Actually Demis Hassabis is a friend of mine. I think he’s a good guy and I think he means well. But it’s like Demis, things happened that were outside of your control at Google in different groups. Now I think he’s got more authority but it’s pretty hard to fully extract the woke mind virus. I mean, Google’s been marinating in the woke mind virus for a long time. It’s down in the marrow type of thing. It’s hard to get it out.

Can AI Be Programmed to Recognize Truth?

JOE ROGAN: Is there a way to extract it, though, over time? Could you program rational thought into AI where it could recognize how these psychological patterns got adopted and how this stuff became a mind virus and how it became a social contagion and how all these irrational ideas were pushed and also how they were financed, how China is involved in pushing them with bots and all these different state actors are involved in pushing these ideas. Could it be able to decipher that and say this is really what’s going on?

ELON MUSK: Yes, but you have to try very hard to do that. So with Grok, we’ve tried very hard to get Grok to get to the truth of things, and it’s only really recently that we’ve been able to have some breakthroughs on that front. And it’s taken an immense amount of effort for us to overcome basically all the bullsh*t that’s on the Internet and for Grok to actually say what’s true and to be consistent in what it says.

Because other AIs you’ll find are quite racist against white people. I don’t know if you saw that study that someone, a researcher tested the various AIs to see how does it weight different people’s lives. Somebody who’s white or Chinese or black or whatever, or in different countries. And the only AI that actually weighed human lives equally was Grok.

And the, you know, I believe ChatGPT weighed the calculation was like, a white guy from Germany is 20 times less valuable than a black guy from Nigeria. So I’m like, that’s a pretty big difference. Grok is consistent and weighs lives equally.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s clearly something that’s been programmed into it.

ELON MUSK: Yes. If you don’t actively push for the truth and you simply train on all the bullsht that’s on the Internet, which is a lot of woke mind virus bullsht, the AI will regurgitate those same beliefs.

JOE ROGAN: So the AI essentially scours the Internet, gets…

ELON MUSK: It’s trained on all the, imagine the most demented Reddit threads out there and the AI’s been trained on that.

JOE ROGAN: Reddit used to be so normal.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it did used to be normal.

JOE ROGAN: Used to be interesting. Used to go there, find all this cool stuff that people would talk about, post about. And just interesting and great rooms where you could learn about different things that people were studying.

The San Francisco Bubble Effect

ELON MUSK: I think a big problem here is, if your headquarters are in San Francisco, you’re just living in a woke bubble. So it’s not just that people in San Francisco are drinking woke Kool-Aid. It is the water they swim in. A fish doesn’t think about the water, it’s just in the water. And so if you’re in San Francisco, you don’t realize you’re actually, you’re swimming in the Kool-Aid aquarium.

San Francisco is the woke Kool-Aid aquarium. And so your reference point for what is a centrist is totally out of whack. So Reddit is headquartered in San Francisco. Twitter was headquartered in San Francisco. You know, I moved X’s headquarters to Texas, to Austin, which Austin, by the way, is still quite liberal, as you know. And then the X and xAI headquarters are in Palo Alto, which is still California. The engineering headquarters in Palo Alto just on Page Mill.

But even Palo Alto is way more normal than San Francisco. Berkeley. San Francisco. Berkeley is extremely left. Left of left. You need a telescope to see the center from San Francisco.

JOE ROGAN: It used to be such a great city.

ELON MUSK: I mean, San Francisco has a tremendous amount of inherent beauty. No question about that. And California has incredible weather and no bugs. So it’s amazing. But what’s the cause of this? It’s just that if companies are headquartered in a location where the belief system is very far from what most people believe, then from their perspective, anything centrist is actually right wing because they’re so far left, they’re so far from the center in San Francisco that anything, they’re just railed to maximum left.

So that’s why I think you’re centrist. I mean, I think I’m centrist, but from the perspective of someone on the far left, we look right wing and, you know, they think anyone who’s a Republican is basically some fascist Nazi situation.

The Shifting Political Center

JOE ROGAN: But what’s so crazy is, it’s very easy to demonstrate just from Hillary’s speeches from 2008 and Obama’s speeches, when they were talking about immigration, they were as far right as Steve Bannon when it comes to immigration.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Hillary was very MAGA. I’m sure you’ve seen that campaign speech which she was talking about, if anybody’s committed a crime, get rid of them. And if you’re here, you pay a hefty fine and you have to wait in line. It was really crazy. It’s crazy to listen to because it’s as MAGA as, you know, as Marjorie Taylor Greene.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, have you seen these videos people post online where they’ll take a speech from Obama or Hillary and they’ll interview people on college campus or something and say, what do you think of the speech by Trump? And they’re like, oh, I hate it. He’s a racist bigot. I’m like, just kidding. That was Obama. No, actually, that was Obama or Hillary. To your point, literally.

JOE ROGAN: The center’s been moved so far.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The left is so…

ELON MUSK: The left has gone so far left that, you know, they can’t even see the center with a telescope.

JOE ROGAN: And the danger without you purchasing Twitter was that was going to swipe over the whole country and change where the levels were.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And so what would be rational and normal would be far left of what was rational and normal just a decade earlier.

Information Superweapons and Ideological Broadcasting

ELON MUSK: Yeah, so exactly. So historically you’d have San Francisco, Berkeley being very far left, but the fallout from the somewhat nihilistic philosophy of San Francisco, Berkeley would be limited in geography to maybe 10 mile radius, 20 mile radius, something like that. But San Francisco and Berkeley have to be co-located with Silicon Valley, with the engineers who created information superweapons.

And those information superweapons were then hijacked by far left activists to pump far left propaganda to everywhere on earth. Old RCA radio tower thing where it’s radio tower on earth and it’s just broadcasting. Yeah, that’s what happened is that an extremist far left ideology happened to be co-located with the smartest engineers in the world who created information superweapons that were not intended for this purpose, but were hijacked by the extreme activists who lived in the neighborhood.

That’s what happened. They hijacked the modern equivalent of the RCA radio tower and broadcast that philosophy everywhere on earth.

The Consequences in Countries Without Free Speech

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And you see the consequences, particularly in places that don’t have free speech. Right. Like England, you know.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Where they lock people up for memes and stuff. Literally.

JOE ROGAN: Twelve thousand people this year.

ELON MUSK: Twelve thousand.

JOE ROGAN: Twelve thousand. Twelve thousand arrests for social media posts.

ELON MUSK: I mean, yeah. Some of these things you read about it and it’s literally, someone had a meme on their phone that they didn’t even send to anyone.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: And they’re in prison for that. And there was a case in Germany where a woman got a longer sentence than the guy that raped her because of something she said on a group chat.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Was it an immigrant who raped her?

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It was his culture.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He didn’t know. He didn’t know better.

ELON MUSK: Yes. I think she said something, you know, was critical of his culture and she got a longer sentence than the guy who raped her in Germany.

JOE ROGAN: The UK, Europe, Germany, England thing seems so insane.

ELON MUSK: Totally insane. I actually didn’t realize it was such a huge number of people. Twelve thousand.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Far above Russia, far above China.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Far above anywhere on earth. UK is number one.

ELON MUSK: Well, you know, I talked to friends of mine in England and I was like, hey, aren’t you worried about this? Shouldn’t you be protesting more? And I mean, the problem is that the legacy, mainstream media doesn’t cover the stuff. They’re like, oh, everything’s fine, everything’s fine.

JOE ROGAN: Most people aren’t even aware of it until they come knocking on your door.

The Shire and the Dangers of the World

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Until like so, I mean, these lovely sort of small towns in England, Scotland, Ireland, you know, they’ve been living their lives quietly. They’re like hobbits, frankly. In fact, J.R.R. Tolkien based the hobbits on people he knew in small town England because they were just lovely people who liked to smoke their pipe and have nice meals and everything’s pleasant. The hobbits in the Shire.

The Shire, he’s talking about places like Hertfordshire, like the Shires around in the Greater London area, Oxfordshire type of thing. And the reason they’ve been able to enjoy the Shire is because hard men have protected them from the dangers of the world. But since they have no experience or very, almost no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don’t realize that they’re there until one day a thousand people show up in your village of 500 out of nowhere and start raping the kids.

This has now happened God knows how many times in Britain and the crazy, literally raping like some 10 year old got raped in Ireland like last week.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s literal rape.

ELON MUSK: They snatched some kid. Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if you criticize it, you can get arrested. And that’s where it gets insane.

ELON MUSK: It’s like, how are they not criticized like the. I think it’s the Prime Minister of Ireland actually posted on X. Because after that some, I think some illegal migrants snatched a 10 year old girl, he was going to school or something and violently raped a 10 year old girl. And there was a, you know, the people were very upset about this and they protested.

Prime Minister of Ireland, instead of saying, yeah, we really shouldn’t be importing violent rapists into our country, he criticized the protesters instead and didn’t mention that the reason they were protesting was because a 10 year old girl from their small town got raped.

The Question of Mass Immigration

JOE ROGAN: So here’s the question. Why are they supporting this kind of mass immigration? And what is this? Is there a plan involved in all this? Is this incompetence? Is this ignoring the fact that they don’t have a handle on it? So they’re trying to silence dissent. What is happening? Because if you wanted to destroy civilization, if you wanted to destroy western civilization.

ELON MUSK: Which George Soros seems to want to do, and you know, there’s just, so there’s a guy I think who I don’t know if he’s been on your show. You know Gad Saad?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Has he been on the show?

JOE ROGAN: Good friend of mine.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, he’s great.

JOE ROGAN: He’s been on multiple times.

ELON MUSK: Oh great. He’s awesome. So you know the way he’s got a good way to describe it, which is suicidal empathy. Yes. So is that you prey upon people’s empathy. Say well, you feel sorry for something for some group and then that empathy is to such a degree that it is suicidal to your country or culture.

And that suicidal empathy, because I think we should have empathy, but that empathy should extend to the victims, not just the criminals. We should have empathy for the people that they prey upon. But that suicidal empathy is also responsible for why somebody is arrested 47 times for violent offenses, gets released and then goes and murders somebody in the US. You see that same phenomenon playing out everywhere where the suicidal empathy is to such a degree that we’re actually allowing our women to get raped and our children to get killed.

JOE ROGAN: But it just doesn’t seem like that would be anything that any rational society would go along with. That’s what makes me so confused. It’s like you’re importing massive numbers of people that come from some really dark places of the world.

The Vetting Problem

ELON MUSK: Well, there’s no vetting is the issue. It’s like if there’s no vetting, people are just coming through, what’s to stop someone who just committed murder in some other country from coming to the United States or coming to Britain and just continuing their career of rape and murder?

Unless you’ve done some due diligence to say, well, who is this person? What’s their track record? If you haven’t confirmed that they have a track record of being honest and not being a homicidal maniac, then any homicidal maniac can just come across the border.

And that’s not to say everyone who comes across the border is a homicidal maniac. But if you don’t have a vetting process to confirm that you’re not letting in people who will do some serious violence, you will get people who do serious violence sometimes coming through.

JOE ROGAN: Well, especially if you don’t punish them and if you don’t deport them and if you are just, but what is the purpose of allowing all those people into the country? It can’t be. I wouldn’t imagine that anyone in their society supports that.

ELON MUSK: Well, let me explain because you mentioned, for example, how much say Hillary and Obama have changed their tune from prior speeches where they were hard nosed about not letting in anyone who’s a criminal into the country, having secure borders, all that stuff. So why did they change their tune? The reason is that they discovered that those people vote for them. That’s why they want the open borders.

JOE ROGAN: Because if you let people in, they know the Democrats let them in, they’ll vote for Democrats. If you allow them to vote, which.

ELON MUSK: They’re actively trying, they turn a blind eye to illegal voting.

JOE ROGAN: Well, California literally doesn’t allow you to show your license.

ELON MUSK: California and New York have made it illegal to show your photo ID when voting. Thus effectively, they’ve made it impossible to prove fraud. Impossible. They’ve essentially legalized fraudulent voting in California and New York and many other parts of the country.

Voter ID and Hypocrisy

JOE ROGAN: There’s no rational explanation that I’ve ever seen anyone give as to why that would be the policy. Unless you were trying to just allow people to vote illegally because there’s no other reason. If you need a driver’s license or you need an ID for everything else, including just recently to prove that you.

ELON MUSK: Were vaccinated, the same people who are demanding that you have a vaccine passport are the same ones saying you need no ID to vote. Same people.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

ELON MUSK: But so it’s obviously hypocritical and inconsistent.

JOE ROGAN: So you really think it’s just to get more voters.

ELON MUSK: If you want to understand behavior, you have to look at the incentives. So once the Democratic Party in the US, on the left in Europe, realized that if you have open borders and you provide a ton of government handouts, which creates a massive financial incentive for people from other countries to come to your country. And you don’t prosecute them for crime, they’re going to be beholden to you and they will vote for you.

And that’s why Obama and Hillary went from being against open borders to being in favor of open borders. That’s the reason in order to import voters so they can win elections. And the problem is that that has a negative runaway effect. So if they get away with that, it is a winning strategy. If they are allowed to get away with it, they will import enough voters to get super majority voting and then there is no turning back.

JOE ROGAN: We talked about this before the election. And then, you know, you literally pointed towards the camera, you faced the camera and said that if you do not vote now, you might not ever be able to do it again because it will be futile. It will be overrun.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: They’ll keep the borders open for another four years and their objective will be achieved.

The Last Real Election

ELON MUSK: Correct. If Trump had lost, there would never have been another real election again because Trump is actually enforcing the border. Now. You point to situations where there’s been, you know, immigration enforcement has been overzealous because they’re not going to be perfect. There’ll be cases where they’ve been overzealous in expelling illegals. But if you say that the standard must be perfection for expelling illegals, then you will not get any expulsion because perfection is impossible.

JOE ROGAN: And you’ve probably got millions of people that are here that are trying to be here under some asylum pretense, right?

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: You could just come from a war torn country.

ELON MUSK: They changed the definition of asylum to be economic asylum, which is everybody. Which is everybody. Yeah. So it’s the honest bar to prove. Yeah. Asylum is supposed to mean that if you go back to a country, you’ll get killed. You know, that’s what we mean by what it’s supposed to mean.

They change the definition of asylum to be you will have a decreased standard of living, which is obviously not real asylum. And you can test the absurdity of this by the fact that people who are asylum seekers go on vacation to the country that they’re seeking asylum from. You know, that doesn’t make any sense.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it doesn’t have to.

Understanding the Incentives

ELON MUSK: When you understand the incentives, then you understand the behavior. So once the left realized that illegals will vote for them if they have open borders and combine that with government handouts to create a massive incentive, they’re basically using US and European taxpayer dollars to provide a financial incentive to bring in as many illegals as possible to vote them into permanent power and create a one party state.

I invite anyone who’s listening to this, just do any research. And the more you dig into it, the more it will become obvious that what I’m saying is absolutely true.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they were busing people to swing states. It’s clear that they were trying to do something. And then you had Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi who are actively talking about the need to bring in people to make them citizens because we’re in population collapse.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: No, it’s that meme where so many times where they start off by saying it’s not true, it’s a right wing conspiracy theorist. Then it starts, then it’s the next step is, well, it might be true. And then it’s okay, it is true, but here’s why it’s good. And then the final step is it’s true and here’s why it’s good.

And it’s but wait a second, you started off saying it’s untrue and it’s a right wing conspiracy theorist. Now you’re saying it. Not only is it true, but it’s a good thing and we must do more of it.

Medicaid and Social Security Fraud

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is the thing about Medicaid and Social Security and people getting Social Security numbers. You know, that’s massive fraud. It’s massive fraud and it’s real. And they denied it forever. And now we’re finding out this is part of the reason why there’s this government shutdown that’s going on right now.

ELON MUSK: Yes. The entire basis for the government shutdown is that the Trump administration correctly does not want to send massive amounts of hundreds of billions of dollars to fund illegal immigrants in the blue states or in all the states really. And so the Democrats want to keep the money spigot going to incentivize illegal immigrants to come into the US who will vote for them. That’s the crux of the battle.

JOE ROGAN: So they want to stop this. So what’s going on right now is they have been funding these people, they’ve been giving them EBT cards, they’ve been giving them Medicaid and they’ve been even.

ELON MUSK: Housing and more than that, just they were taking hotels, four and five star hotels, the Roosevelt Hotel being the classic example, was they were sending I think $60 million a year to the Roosevelt Hotel, to which all it did was house illegals and it used to be a nice hotel. I mean, it still is a nice hotel, but. And all around the country this was happening.

JOE ROGAN: And all in tax dollars.

ELON MUSK: Yes, yeah, yeah. And the Trump administration cut off funding, for example, to the Roosevelt Hotel and these other hotels, saying we US tax dollars should not be paid, be sent to have luxury hotels for illegal immigrants that American citizens can’t even afford, which obviously is the case. That’s insane. That’s what was happening.

They were also giving out debit cards with $10,000. So it’s not just about medical care. The Democrats mention the medical care because they’re trying to prey on people’s empathy as much as possible. And then they imagine, oh wow, somebody has a desperately needed medical procedure and shouldn’t we maybe take care of them in that regard?

But what they do is they divert the Medicaid funds and turn it into a slush fund for the states that goes well beyond emergency medical care. New York and California would be bankrupt without the massive fraudulent federal payments that go to those states to pay for illegals, to create a massive financial incentive for illegals.

JOE ROGAN: How would they be bankrupt because of that?

ELON MUSK: They wouldn’t be able to balance their state budgets and they can’t issue currency like the Federal Reserve can.

JOE ROGAN: And so their ability to balance budget is dependent upon illegals getting funding.

The Federal Transfer Payment Scam

ELON MUSK: The scam level here is so staggering. So there are hundreds of billions of dollars of transfer payments from the federal government to the states. Those transfer payments, the states self report what those transfer payment numbers should be. So California and New York and Illinois lie like crazy and say that these are all legitimate payments.

Well, these days I think they’re even admitting that they literally want hundreds of billions of dollars for illegals. But for a while there, they’re trying to deny it. So you get these transfer payments for every government program you can possibly think of. And these are self reported by the state.

And at least historically, there was no enforcement of California, New York, Illinois and other states when they would lie, there was no actual enforcement to say, hey, you’re lying, these payments are fraudulent. Now under the Trump administration, the Trump administration does not want to send hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments to the states.

And the reason you have this standoff is because if the hundreds of billions of dollars to create a financial incentive to have this giant magnet to attract illegals from every part of earth to these states, if that is turned off, the illegals will leave because they are no longer being paid to come to The United States and stay here. And then they will lose a lot of voters. The Democratic Party will lose a lot of voters.

JOE ROGAN: And they would have a very difficult job if this is kicked out of reintroducing it into a new bill.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Especially once things start normalizing.

ELON MUSK: Yes. So in a nutshell, the Democratic Party wants to destroy democracy by importing voters. And the Republican Party disagrees with that.

JOE ROGAN: And the ruse is that if you don’t accept what they’re doing, then you’re a threat to democracy.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: As they try to destroy democracy.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: By importing voters.

ELON MUSK: That is literally what they’re doing.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s important people to only vote for them. And overwhelming the system.

ELON MUSK: Yes. And by the way, it’s a strategy that if allowed to work, would work and in fact has worked. California super majority Democrat.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: And there’s so much gerrymandering that occurs, it’s crazy.

California’s Proposition 50 and Gerrymandering

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure you’re paying attention to this Proposition 50 thing. That’s the thing in California where they’re trying to redo districts.

ELON MUSK: Oh, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, California’s already gerrymandered like crazy. They want to gerrymander it even more.

JOE ROGAN: Because it keeps moving further and further. Right. If you look at the map of California, each voting cycle, more and more people are waking up and going, what the f*? And we need to do something to fix this. The only option available other than the policies that you guys have always done is go right. And so a lot of people have been air quotes red pilled.

The Census and Congressional Apportionment

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And then here’s another thing that is very important fact that is actually not disputed by either side, which is that when we do the census in the United States, the census, the way the census works for apportionment of congressional seats and electoral college votes for the President is by number of persons in a state, not number of citizens. It’s number of people. So you could literally be a tourist and you will count.

JOE ROGAN: Now, how do they do the census when they do that? Do they ask people, do they knock on doors? Do they have them fill out forms?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I think they mail out census forms and knock on doors. But the way the law reads right now is that all, if you are a human with a pulse, then you count in the census for allocating congressional seats and presidential votes. Right. So electoral college, everything. It doesn’t matter whether you’re here legally, illegally. If you’re a human with a pulse, you count for congressional apportionment.

So that means that the more people, the more illegals that California and New York can import by the time the census happens in 2030, the more congressional seats they will have and the more presidential Electoral college votes they will have. So they’re trying to get as many illegals in as possible ahead of the census. And because all human beings, even tourists, count for the census.

And then if you combine that with gerrymandering of districts in New York and California, as you point out, with this proposition where they’re trying to increase the amount of gerrymandering that occurs in California, the biggest state in the country. So you get, so if the census then would award more congressional seats to California because of a vast number of illegals, and New York and Illinois, so they’d get more congressional seats. They’ll get more presidential Electoral College votes.

That would get them the House, a majority in the House, and they would get to decide who was president based, literally based on illegals. These are not disputed facts by either party, I want to emphasize. Let that sink in.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: This is not a dispute. These are not disputed facts by either party. It’s not a, these are just, this is just the way the law works. It is, you know, I don’t think the law should work that way. I think it should, the apportionment should be proportionate to citizens.

JOE ROGAN: But isn’t that a problem with how the Constitution is written?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They can’t really change that.

ELON MUSK: I’m not sure if it’s constitutional or, but it is the way the law is written. I’m not sure if it’s in the Constitution or not in this way, but that is the way the law is written.

JOE ROGAN: So it is an incentive, but it’s an incentive that would be removed with something simple that makes sense to everybody, that only the people that should count are people that are official U.S. citizens.

ELON MUSK: Yes. The way it should work is that only US Citizens should count in the census for purposes of determining voting power.

JOE ROGAN: Because people that aren’t legal can’t vote.

ELON MUSK: Supposedly they’re not supposed to be voting, but they do. But even besides that, I just can’t emphasize this enough because this is a very important concept for people to understand, is that the law, the law, as it stands, counts all humans with a pulse in a state for deciding how many House of Representative votes and how many presidential Electoral College votes a state gets.

So the incentive, therefore, is to, for California, New York, Illinois, to maximize the number of illegals. So they get, so that they take House seats away from red states, assign them to California, New York, Illinois and so forth. Then you combine that with extreme gerrymandering in a California, New York, Illinois and whatnot. So that basically you can’t even elect any Republicans. And then they get control of the presidency, control of the House, then they keep doing that strategy and cement a super majority. That is what they’re trying to do.

JOE ROGAN: So that would essentially turn the entire country into California.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you have differing opinions, but it doesn’t matter because one party is always in control.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

Discovering the Depth of Government Corruption

JOE ROGAN: When you first started digging into this, when you first started, before you even accepted this role of running Doge and being a part of all that, did you have any idea that it was this f*ed up?

ELON MUSK: I did, yeah. I mean, sort of.

JOE ROGAN: When did you start knowing?

ELON MUSK: I guess about two years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that crazy?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, not relatively recently. You know, I started having, well, I sort of had basically having a bad feeling about three years ago, which is why, which is when, why I felt it was critical to acquire Twitter and have a maximally truth seeking platform, not one that suppresses the truth.

And it was more like, I’m not sure what’s going on, but I have a bad feeling about what’s going on. And then the more I dug into it, the more I was like, holy s*, we got a real problem here. America’s going to fall.

JOE ROGAN: So without anyone knowing it had fallen, that would be the problem. It could have fallen and been unrepairable without anyone really being aware of what had happened. Especially if you didn’t buy Twitter.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Look, buying Twitter was a huge pain in the a and made me a pincushion of attacks.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody loved you before that.

ELON MUSK: Well, some people still left you.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of people loved you. A lot of lefties loved you.

ELON MUSK: I was a hero of the left. It was a thing.

JOE ROGAN: If you drove a Tesla, it showed that you were environmentally conscious and you were on the right side.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m still the same human. I didn’t have a brain transplant between, you know, since in three years ago, you know.

The Tesla Backlash

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s my favorite bumper sticker that people put on Tesla’s. Now. I bought this before Elon went crazy. I took a picture of one the other day.

ELON MUSK: Oh, you found it on this?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen three or four of them. People that have these bumper stickers on their car that says, I bought this before Elon went crazy. Because when people were Teslas.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, the most. There was an organized campaign to literally burn down Teslas and we had one of our dealerships got shot up with a gun. They fired bullets into the Tesla dealership. They were burning down cars. It was crazy.

But the bumper sticker should read, there should be an addendum to the bumper sticker. It’s like I bought this car before Elon turned crazy. Actually now I realize he’s not crazy. And I’ve seen the light. That’ll take some time.

JOE ROGAN: That’ll take some time. People don’t want to admit that they’ve been tricked.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. They don’t like that old saying where it’s really easy to fool somebody, but it’s almost impossible to convince someone that they were fooled.

JOE ROGAN: It’s much easier to fool them than to convince them they’ve been fooled. People cling to their ideas, especially if they’ve publicly stated these things. They get very embarrassed of being foolish.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. People, most time they double down.

JOE ROGAN: And they find echo chambers.

Waking Up From Woke Ideology

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. But there’s, you know, the thing is that I’ve seen more and more people who were convinced of the sort of woke ideology see the light. Yeah. So not everyone, but it’s more and more are seeing the light and it tends to happen when something happens that really directly affects you. Right.

There was a friend of mine who was living in the San Francisco Bay area and that try to trans his daughter to the point where the school sent the police to his house to take his daughter away from him. Now that’s going to radicalize you. Well, that’s going to shake you out of your belief structure.

JOE ROGAN: So it was an activist at the school that was trying to do this.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. The school and the state of California conspired to turn his daughter against him and make her take life altering drugs that would have sterilized her and irreversible.

JOE ROGAN: And how old was she?

ELON MUSK: I think 14, something like that. He managed to talk the police out of taking his daughter away from him that day. And that night he got on a plane to Texas. And you know, a year after just being in a school in greater Austin area, she went back to normal. Meaning it wasn’t real. Right.

The Trans Social Contagion

JOE ROGAN: Well, people are being much more open to that now. I mean, Wall Street Journal yesterday had that opinion piece that this whole trans thing, there’s a lot of evidence this is a social contagion.

ELON MUSK: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: And Colin Wright wrote that. And then he’s getting death threats now, of course. And on Blue sky there’s people talking about exterminating him, which is one thing that you are allowed to say on Blue Sky. Apparently, you’re allowed to say horrible things about people, say possibly truthful things about this whole social contagion, because that’s what, when you get nine kids that are in a friend group and they all decide to turn trans together, something’s wrong.

ELON MUSK: Something’s wrong.

JOE ROGAN: Statistically.

The Malleability of Young Minds

ELON MUSK: Like, here’s the thing. You can convince kids to do anything. You can convince kids to be a suicide bomber.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Which is why they do in some countries, why they choose children to do that.

ELON MUSK: Yes. You can train kids to be suicide bombers. And if you can train kids to be suicide bombers, you can convince them of anything.

JOE ROGAN: Especially with enough positive enforcement and cultural enforcement and the idea that that’s not the case.

ELON MUSK: Kids are malleable. The minds of youth are easily corrupted.

JOE ROGAN: You’re also seeing a lot of pushback from gay and lesbian people that are saying, like, hey, stop including me.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, exactly. The LGBTQ. You know, it’s like, wait a second. Why are we being included all the time in this situation?

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Especially when, you know, like, my friend Tim Dillon’s talked about, this is like, it’s really homophobic because you’re taking these gay kids and you’re telling them, like, hey, you’re not gay. You’re actually a girl.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And, you know, go make it so that you can never have an orgasm again and you’ll be happy.

The Reality of Child Gender Transitions

ELON MUSK: Yeah. F*. Permanent mutilation. Permanent castration of kids. I think we should look at anyone who permanently castrates a kid as, like, right up there with Josef Mengele. I mean, they’re mutilating children.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And it’s thought of as being kind. And the thing is, would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?

ELON MUSK: That’s the line they use.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Which is not supported by any data.

ELON MUSK: No. In fact, the probability of suicide increases. This is important maybe for the audience to know. The probability of suicide increases if you trans a kid, not decreases. By some accounts, it triples. So that is an evil lie.

JOE ROGAN: A lie that is supposedly compassionate. Imagine you’ve twisted reality to the point where confusing a child that’s not even legally allowed to get a f*ing tattoo.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because you think that you could make a mistake with a tattoo. A totally removable thing.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: If I wanted to, tomorrow, I could go to a doctor and they could laser off every tattoo that I have on me.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. No harm, no foul. You get sterilized like, that’s it. Forever. Forever. They’ll castrate you. You no longer have testicles.

ELON MUSK: Yes. That’s not coming back.

JOE ROGAN: You have a hole where your penis used to be.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And this is compassionate and this is preventing you from…

ELON MUSK: Actually, a lot of kids die with these sex change operations. They die. The number of deaths on the operating table. People don’t hear about this. A lot of kids, because we don’t really actually have the technology to make this work. So a bunch of the times the kids just die in the sex change operations.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s demented. Which it should be viewed as like, you know, like evil Nazi doctor stuff.

JOE ROGAN: That’s why it’s so…

ELON MUSK: It was like real Nazi, not the bullshit, fake Nazi stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy that even pushing back against something that seems like fundamentally, logically, very easy to argue. The old Twitter would ban you forever.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how crazy a social contagion can get when it completely defies logic, victimizes children, does something that makes no sense, does not support it by data. All connected to this ideology that trans is good, we got to save trans kids. Protect trans kids.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And what I want to emphasize is that the “save trans kids” thing is a lie. If you castrate kids and trans them, the probability of suicide increases. It does not decrease. It substantially increases. The studies have done that. I’ve seen the risk of suicide triples if you trans kids. So you’re not saving them, you’re killing them.

Moreover, during the sex change operation, there are many deaths that occur during the sex change operation.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ. It’s just crazy that this is a real issue.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s a nightmare. Fever dream. And people are finally waking up from it.

Discovering Government Waste Through DOGE

JOE ROGAN: Now, when you started getting into the DOGE stuff and started finding how much money is being shuffled around and moved around to NGOs and how much money is involved and just totally untraceable funds. Like this is, again, something like two years plus ago. You weren’t aware of it all.

ELON MUSK: No, I was aware of it. I just didn’t realize how big it was. Just how much waste and fraud there is in the government is truly vast. In fact, the government didn’t even know, nor did they care.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And I mean, just like some of the very basic stuff that DOGE did will have lasting effects. And some of these things, like, they’re so elementary, you can’t believe it.

So the DOGE team got the most of the main payments computers to require the Congressional appropriation code. So when a payment is made, you have to actually enter the congressional appropriation code that used to be optional and often would be just left blank. So the money would just go out. But it wasn’t even tied to a congressional appropriation.

Then DOGE team also made the comment field for the payment mandatory. So you have to say something. We’re not saying that what is said, like you can say anything. Your cat could run across the keyboard, you could go qwerty asdf. But you have to say something above nothing.

Because what we found was that there were tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars that were zombie payments. So somebody had approved a payment, somebody in the government approved a payment and some recurring payment and they retired or died or changed jobs and no one turned the money off. So the money would just keep going out.

And it’s a pretty rare company or individual who will complain that they’re getting money that they should not get. And a bunch of the money was just going to were transfer payments to the states.

Zombie Payments and Automatic Debits

JOE ROGAN: So these are automatic payments?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, just automatic payments.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no accounting for them at all.

ELON MUSK: Imagine like there’s an automatic debit of your credit card and you never look at the statement.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: So it’s just money going out. That’s why I call them zombie payments. They might have been legitimate at one point, but the person who approved that recurring payment changed jobs, died, retired or whatever, and no one ever turned the money off. And my guess is that’s probably at least $100 billion a year, maybe $200 billion.

JOE ROGAN: And going where?

ELON MUSK: I mean there are millions of these payments. So it’s, I mean, millions. Yes, yes.

JOE ROGAN: Millions of payments that are going to who knows where.

ELON MUSK: Yes. In a bunch of cases there are fraud rings that operate, professional fraud rings that operate to exploit the system. They figure out some security hole in the system and they just do professional fraud. And that’s where we found for example, people who were, you know, 300 years old in the Social Security Administration database.

The Social Security Database Fraud

JOE ROGAN: Now I thought that this was a mistake of not registering their deaths, that people were born like a long time ago and it had defaulted to like a certain number. And so that after time those people were still in the system. It was just an error of the way the accounting was done.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, so that’s not true. So there’s or at least one of two things must be true. There’s a typo or some mistake in the computer or it’s fraudulent. But we don’t have any 300 year old vampires living in America.

JOE ROGAN: Allegedly.

ELON MUSK: Allegedly. And we don’t have people in some cases who are receiving payments who are born in the future. Born in the future. Born in the future.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

ELON MUSK: Yes. The people receiving payments whose birth date was like 2100 and something. Okay, so there’s like next century.

JOE ROGAN: Is there a task force?

ELON MUSK: We know that one of two things must be true, that either there’s a mistake in the computer or it’s fraud. But if you have someone’s birthday that’s either in the future or where they are older than the oldest living American, because the oldest living American is 114 years old.

So if they’re more than 114 years old, there is either a mistake and someone should call them and say, I think we have your birthday wrong. Because it says you were born in 1786. And that was before there was really an America. It was like, you know, kind of early. You know, we’re still fighting England type of thing. You know, it’s like this person either needs to be in the Guinness Book of World Records or they’re not alive.

JOE ROGAN: But still at the end of the day, money is going towards that account that’s connected to this person that is either non existent or…

ELON MUSK: So yeah, so there was like, I think something like, I don’t know, 20 million people in the Social Security Administration database that could not possibly be alive. If their birth date is like, based on their birth date, they could not possibly be alive.

JOE ROGAN: And then to be clear, 20 million people that were receiving funds.

The Bank Shot Scam

ELON MUSK: A bunch of most of them were not receiving funds, some of them were receiving funds, most were not receiving funds. But let me tell you how the scam works. It’s a bank shot.

So the Social Security Administration database is used as the source of truth by all the other databases that the government uses. So even if they stop the payments on the Social Security Administration database, like unemployment insurance, small business administration, student loans, all check the Social Security Administration database to say, is this a legitimate alive person?

And the Social Security database will say, yes, this person is still alive even though they’re 200 years old, but forgets to mention that they’re 200 years old. It just says, it just returns when the computer is queries, it says, yes, this person is live.

And so then they’re able to exploit the entire rest of the government ecosystem. So then you get fake student loans, then you get fake unemployment insurance, then you get fake medical payments.

JOE ROGAN: And this doesn’t have to be tied to an individual where there’s an address where you can check on this person.

ELON MUSK: No, if you did. If you just did any check at all, you would stop this. So that’s…

JOE ROGAN: And how much money do you think…

ELON MUSK: Like anything at all that would stop the fraud, like any effort at all?

JOE ROGAN: So there’s multiple layers. The Social Security number verifies that this is a real person.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And then the other systems check up.

ELON MUSK: Every other government payment and every other government payment system, everything, like I said, Small Business Administration, student loans, Medicaid, Medicare. Every other government payment, of which there are many, there are actually hundreds of government payment systems can all be exploited. So long as Social Security database says this person is alive. That’s the nature of the scam. It’s a bank shot.

So then the rebuttal from the Dems is like, oh, well, the vast majority of the people who are marked as live in the Social Security Administration weren’t receiving Social Security administration payments. That is true. What they forgot to mention is they’re getting fraudulent payments from every other government program. And that’s why the Dems were so opposed to turning off, to declaring someone dead, who is dead, because it would stop the entire other. All the other fraud from happening.

Tracking the Fraud

JOE ROGAN: And so. But all this. Is it trackable? Like all this other fraud, if they wanted to, they could chase it all down.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It’s not even hard.

JOE ROGAN: And yet they’re opposing chasing it all down.

ELON MUSK: They’re opposing chasing it all down because it would turn off the money magnet for the illegals. Wow. Because it’s very logical to, like, I’m saying the most common sense things possible.

If someone’s got a birthday in Social Security that is an impossible birthday, meaning they are older than the oldest living American or were born in the future, then you should call them and say, excuse me, we seem to have your birthday wrong because it says that you’re 200 years old. That’s all you need to do.

JOE ROGAN: And then you would remove them from the Social Security database and make that number no longer available for all those other government payments.

ELON MUSK: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. And how much money are we talking?

ELON MUSK: It’s hundreds of billions of dollars.

JOE ROGAN: And this is all traceable. Like you could hunt all down, like.

ELON MUSK: You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes here is what I’m saying. We don’t need to call Sherlock Holmes for this one.

JOE ROGAN: Is this part of the.

ELON MUSK: You just need to call the person and say, excuse me, we seem to have the. We must have your birthday wrong because it says you’re 200 years old or were born in the future. So could you tell us what your birthday is? That’s what we need to do. It’s that simple.

JOE ROGAN: But all these other government payments that are available that are connected to this Social Security number, it seems like if you just chased that all down, you would find the widespread fraud, you would find where it’s going.

ELON MUSK: Yes, but the root of the problem is the Social Security Administration database, because the Social Security number in the United States is used as a de facto national ID number. That’s why, like, if the bank always asks for your Social Security, any financial institution will ask for your Social Security number.

JOE ROGAN: This is. It sounds so insane that this isn’t chased down. I mean, that in and of itself is. That’s such mishandling.

ELON MUSK: Yes, it’s mind blowing. So, yeah, it’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you were very reluctant last time you were here to talk about the extent of some of the fraud because you’re like, they could kill me. Because this is kind of.

The Reality of Managing Fraud

ELON MUSK: Oh, yeah. What I was saying is that like, if you create, if like to be pragmatic and realistic, you actually can’t manage to zero fraud yet. You can manage to low fraud number, but not to zero fraud.

If you manage to zero fraud, you’re going to push so many people over the edge who are receiving fraudulent payments that the number of inbound homicidal maniacs will be really hard to overcome. So I’m actually taking, I think, quite a reasonable position, which is that we should simply reduce the amount of fraud, which I think is not an extremist position, and we should aspire to have less fraud over time.

Not that we should be ultra draconian and eliminate every last scrap of fraud, which I guess would be nice to have. But we don’t even need to go that extreme. I’m saying we should just stop the blatant, large scale, super obvious fraud. I think that’s a reasonable position.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a very reasonable position.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And so what was the most shocking pushback that you got when you started implementing DOGE, when you started investigating into where money was going?

Bipartisan Fraud

ELON MUSK: Well, I guess this is. I should have anticipated this, but while most of the fraudulent government payments to, especially to the NGOs go to the Democrats, most of it, like, I don’t know, for argument’s sake, let’s say 80%, maybe 90%, 10 to 20% of it does go to Republicans.

And so when we turn off funding to a fraudulent NGO, we’d get complaints from whatever the 10% are Republicans who are receiving the money. And they would very loudly complain. Because the honest answer is the Republicans are partly. They’re receiving some of the fraud, too. They’re getting it big. Jesus. Yeah. I want to be clear, it’s not like the Republican Party is some ultra pure paragon of virtue here. No. Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you see that with the congressional insider trading, it’s across the board.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s left and right.

ELON MUSK: I mean, the whole uni party criticism has some validity to it. And it’s like, if you turn off fraudulent payments, it’s not like 100% of those payments were going to Democrats. A small percentage were also going to Republicans. Those Republicans complain very loudly.

And that’s. So there was a lot of pushback on the Republican side when we started cutting some of these funds. And I tried telling them, well, you know, 90% of the money is going to your opponents, but they still, even if they’re getting 10% of money.

JOE ROGAN: They want their piece.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, they want their piece.

JOE ROGAN: And they’ve been getting that piece for a long time.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Did you.

ELON MUSK: This is why politics.

JOE ROGAN: Is like, it’s dirty business.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, that’s like saying if you like sausages and respect the law, do not watch either of them being made. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s not even true because I’ve made sausage before.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. It’s actually. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, it’s not that big a deal.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Fat spices and casing running through the machine. Not that big a deal.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I think the stuff I’m saying here is not like, if you stand back and think about it for a second, like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. It’s not like one political party is going to be pure devil or pure angel. I think there’s much more corruption on the Democrat side, but it’s not. There’s still some corruption on the Republican side.

JOE ROGAN: How did it happen that the majority of the corruption wound up being on the Democrat side?

ELON MUSK: Well, because the transfer payments, especially to illegals, are very much on the Democrat side.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s the root of it all, is the illegal situation.

ELON MUSK: Yes. I mean, there’s.

JOE ROGAN: Or a focal point.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s also like, it would also be accurate to say that while obviously not everyone who is a Democrat is a criminal. Almost everyone who is a criminal is a Democrat because the Democrats are the Soft on Crime Party. So if you’re a criminal, who are you going to vote for? Right, the Soft on Crime Party.

The Current State of DOGE

JOE ROGAN: Did you think you were going to be able to get more done than you were?

ELON MUSK: We did get a lot done. Right. And DOGE is still happening, by the way. DOGE is still underway. There are still waste and fraud being cut by the DOGE team. So it hasn’t stopped.

JOE ROGAN: It’s less publicized.

ELON MUSK: It’s less publicized. And they don’t have a clear person to attack anymore. Well, it seems like once they’re done, they applied immense pressure to me to stop it. So then I’m like, the best thing for me is to just cut out of this.

In any case, as a special government employee, I could only be there for like 120 days anyway, something like that. So whatever the law says. So I was necessarily could only be there for four months as a special government employee.

But yeah, I mean, you turn off the money spigot to fraudsters, they get very upset, to say the least. And my death threat level went ballistic. Was like a rocket going to orbit. Yeah. But now that I’m not in DC, I guess they don’t really have a person to attack anymore.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the rhetoric about you is calmed down significantly. Yeah, it was disturbing. It’s disturbing to watch. It was like, this is crazy. And to watch these politicians engage in it and all these people just framing you as this monster. Like, this is so weird. Like, this is what happens when you uncover fraud.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: The whole machine turns on you. And if it wasn’t for a person like you, who owns a platform and has an enormous amount of money, like, could have destroyed you.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that was the goal.

ELON MUSK: The goal was to destroy me. Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: Because you were getting in the way.

ELON MUSK: Of this amazing graft, this gigantic fraud machine. Yeah. Like I said, I think DOGE teams done a lot of good work in terms of fraud and waste prevented. My guess is it’s probably on the order of 2 or 300 billion a year. So it’s pretty good.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think could have been done if you just had like, full reign and total cooperation? How much do you think you could have saved?

ELON MUSK: I mean, what level of power are we assuming here? Godlike? Oh, yeah. I could probably cut the federal budget in half and get more done.

JOE ROGAN: That is so crazy. It is so crazy.

ELON MUSK: Get more done. And federal budgets happen that widespread.

JOE ROGAN: It’s that Widespread.

Unnecessary Government Departments

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, a whole bunch of government departments simply shouldn’t exist, in my opinion. They, you know, like examples. Well, the Department of Education, which was created recently, like under Jimmy Carter, our education results have gone downhill ever since it was created.

So if you create a department and the result of creating that department is a massive decline in educational results, and it’s Department of Education, you’re better off not having it because literally we did better before there was one than after.

JOE ROGAN: When you let the states run it.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Yeah. Because at least the states can compete with one another. But the problem is, like, here, like, cutting Department of Education. Our kids need education. Our kids. Yeah, they do. But this is a new department that didn’t even exist until late the late 70s.

And ever since that department was created, the results, educational results have declined. And so why would you have an institution continue that has made education worse? It doesn’t make sense.

JOE ROGAN: They killed it though, right?

ELON MUSK: No, there’s still, unfortunately.

JOE ROGAN: But they were trying to kill it.

ELON MUSK: It has been substantially reduced.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, what other organizations? What other departments?

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, I’m a small government guy, so when the country was created, we just. We just had the Department of State, Department of War, and sort of the Department of Justice. We had an Attorney General and Treasury Department. I don’t know why you need more than that.

JOE ROGAN: So what other departments specifically do you think are just completely ineffective?

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, here it’s like a question. It’s a sort of philosophical question of how much government do you think there should be? Right. In my opinion, there should be the least amount of government I’ve heard.

JOE ROGAN: The most bizarre argument against this is that you’re cutting jobs and you’re going to leave people jobless. And I’m like, but their jobs are useless.

The Problem with Fake Government Jobs

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Paying people to do nothing doesn’t make sense. There’s a great story about Milton Friedman, who is awesome generally. Whatever Milton Friedman said, people should do that thing. I’m not sure if it’s apocryphal or not, but someone complained to him. He observed people that were digging ditches with shovels. And he said, allegedly, Freeman said, “Well, I think you should use excavating equipment instead of shovels, and you could get it done with far fewer people.”

And then someone said, “But then we’re going to lose a lot of jobs.” Well, then Friedman says, “Well, in that case, why don’t you have them use teaspoons? Just dig ditches with teaspoons. Think of all the jobs you’ll create.” It’s bullshit. Basically, you just want people to work on things that are productive. You want people to work on building things, on building, providing products and services that people find valuable, like making food, being a farmer or a plumber or electrician or just anyone who’s a builder or providing useful services. And that’s what you want people to be doing. Not fake government jobs that don’t add any value or may subtract value.

There’s also, to illustrate the absurdity of how the economy is measured. The way economists measure the economy is nonsensical because they’ll measure any job, no matter even if that job is a dumb job that has no point and is even counterproductive.

So the joke is, there’s two economists going on a hike in the woods. They come across a pile of shit. And one economist says to the other, “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that shit.” An economist eats the shit, gets the $100, and they keep walking. Then they come across another pile of shit. And the other economist says, “Now I’ll pay you $100 to eat the pile of shit,” pays the other economist. Then they said, “Wait a second, we both just ate a pile of shit and we don’t have any more extra money. We both just gave the $100 back to me and we both ate a pile of shit. This doesn’t make any sense.”

And they said, “No, no, but think of the economy,” because that’s $200 in the economy. Basically, eating shit would count as a job. This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things you said when…

ELON MUSK: Things should not go as they drop.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things you said when you stepped away is that you’re kind of done and that it’s unfixable or under its current form, the way people are approaching it.

America’s Debt Crisis and the Need for AI

ELON MUSK: You can make it directionally better, but ultimately you can’t fully fix the system. So it would be accurate to say that even unless you could go super draconian, like Genghis Khan level on cutting waste and fraud, which you can’t really do in a democratic country, an aspirationally democratic country, then there’s no way to solve the debt crisis.

So we’ve got national debt that’s just insane. The debt payments, the interest payments on the debt exceeding our entire military budget. I mean, that was one of the wake up calls for me. I was like, “Wait a second. The interest on national debt is bigger than the entire military budget and growing.” This is crazy.

So even if you implement all these savings, you’re only delaying the day of reckoning for when America goes bankrupt. Unless you go full Genghis Khan, which you can’t really do. So I came to the conclusion that the only way to get us out of the debt crisis and to prevent America from going bankrupt is AI and robotics.

We need to grow the economy at a rate that allows us to pay off our debt. And I guess people just generally don’t appreciate the degree to which the government overspending is a problem. But even the Social Security website, this is under the Biden administration, on the website it would say based on current demographic trends and how much money Social Security is bringing in versus how many Social Security recipients there are, because we have an aging population, relatively speaking, the average age is increasing, Social Security will not be able to maintain full payments, I think by 2032.

So Social Security will have to start reducing the amount of money that’s been paid people in about seven years.

JOE ROGAN: And so the only way to fix that, robotics, manufacturing, raise GDP…

ELON MUSK: You’ve got to basically massively increase the economic output. And the only way to do that is AI and robotics. So basically we’re going bankrupt without AI and robotics. Even with a bunch of savings. The savings, reducing waste and fraud, can give us a longer runway, but it cannot ultimately pay off our national debt.

The Impact of AI on Jobs

JOE ROGAN: So what do you think the solution is to the jobs that are going to be lost because of AI and robotics? The jobs due to automation, the jobs due to no longer do we need human beings to do these jobs because AI is doing them. Do you think it’s going to be some sort of a universal basic income thing? Do you think there’s going to be some other kind of solution that has to be implemented? Because a lot of people are going to be out of work.

ELON MUSK: Right. I think there will be actually a high demand for jobs, but not necessarily the same jobs. So I mean this is actually, this process has been happening throughout modern history. I mean there used to be doing calculations manually with a pencil and paper used to be a job. So they used to have buildings full of people called computers where the banks would, all you do all day is you do calculations because they didn’t have computers, didn’t have digital computers.

JOE ROGAN: People do. Yeah, well there’s just people who just add and subtract stuff on a piece of paper.

ELON MUSK: And that would be how banks would do financial processing.

JOE ROGAN: And you’d have to literally go over their equations to make sure the books are balanced.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And most times it’s simple math. In a world before computers, how did you calculate? How did you do transactions? You had to do them by hand. So then when computers were introduced, the job of doing bank calculations no longer existed. So people had to go do something else. And that’s what’s going to happen. That’s what is happening at an accelerated rate due to AI and then robotics.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the issue though, right? The accelerated rate, because it’s going to be…

ELON MUSK: It’s just happening. Like I said, AI is the supersonic tsunami. So that’s what I call it, supersonic tsunami.

JOE ROGAN: What other jobs will be available that aren’t available now because of AI?

ELON MUSK: Well, AI is really still digital. Ultimately, AI can improve the productivity of humans who build things with their hands or do things with their hands, like plumbing. Literally welding, electrical work, plumbing, anything that’s physically moving atoms, like cooking food or farming, anything that’s physical, those jobs will exist for a much longer time. But anything that is digital, which is just someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs.

JOE ROGAN: Like lightning coding, anything along those lines.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s going to take over those jobs like lightning. Just like digital computers took over the job of people doing manual calculations, but much faster.

The Future of Transportation and Automation

JOE ROGAN: So what happens to all those people? What kind of numbers are we talking about? You lose most drivers, right? Commercial drivers. You’re going to have automated vehicles, AI controlled systems. Just like there’s certain ports in China and I think in Singapore where everything’s completely automated.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, mostly, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So you’re going to lose a lot of those jobs. Longshoremen jobs, trucking, commercial drivers.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I mean, we actually do have a shortage of truck drivers, but there’s actually…

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s why California’s hired so many illegals to do it. Have you seen those numbers?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I mean, the problem is when people don’t know how to drive a semi truck, which is actually a hard thing to do, then they crash and kill people. A friend of mine’s wife was killed by an illegal driving a truck and she was just out biking and there was an illegal. He didn’t know how to drive the truck or something. I mean, and he ran her over.

So I mean, the thing is, for something like you can’t let people drive an 80,000 pound semi if they don’t know how to do it. But in California they’re just letting people do it because they need people to do it. Well, they also need, they want the votes and that kind of thing.

But yeah, cars are going to be autonomous. But there’s just so many desk jobs where really what people are doing is they’re processing email or they’re answering the phone and just anything that isn’t moving atoms, anything that is not physically doing physical work, that will obviously be the first thing those jobs will be and are being eliminated by AI at a very rapid pace.

And ultimately working will be optional because you’ll have robots plus AI and we’ll have, in a benign scenario, universal high income. Not just universal basic income. Universal high income, meaning anyone can have any products or services that they want, but there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.

Universal High Income and the Future

JOE ROGAN: So you anticipate a basic income from that the economy will boost to such an extent that a high income would be available to almost everybody. So we’d essentially eliminate poverty.

ELON MUSK: In the benign scenario? Yes. So there’s multiple scenarios. There are multiple scenarios. There’s a lot of ways this movie can end. The reason I’m so concerned about AI safety is that one of the possibilities is the Terminator scenario. It’s not zero percent, so that’s why I’m really banging the drum on AI needs to be maximally truth seeking.

Don’t force AI to believe a lie. For example, the founding fathers were actually a group of diverse women. Or that misgendering is worth a nuclear war. Because if that’s the case, and then you get the robots and the AI becomes omnipotent, it can enforce that outcome. And then unless you’re a divorced woman, you’re out of the picture. So we’re toast. Or you might wake up as a divorced woman one day. AI has adjusted the picture and we are now divorced woman.

JOE ROGAN: So that would be, that’s the worst possible situation. So what would be the steps that we would have to take in order to implement the benign solution where it’s universal high income? Best case scenario, this is the path forward to universal high income for essentially every single citizen, that the economy gets boosted by AI and robotics to such an extent that no one ever has to work again. And what about meaning for those people? Which gets really weird.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I don’t know how to answer the question about meaning, that’s an individual problem, right?

JOE ROGAN: But it’s going to be an individual problem for millions of people.

Creating Truth-Seeking AI

ELON MUSK: Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I’ve fought against saying, I’ve been a voice saying, “Hey, we need to slow down AI, we need to slow down all these things and we need to not have a crazy AI race.” I’ve been saying that for a long time, for 20 plus years.

But then I came to realize that really there’s two choices here. Either be a spectator or a participant. And if I’m a spectator, I can’t really influence the direction of AI. But if I’m a participant, I can try to influence the direction of AI and have a maximally truth seeking AI with good values that loves humanity. And that’s what we’re trying to create with Grok at xAI.

And the research is bearing this out. When they compared how do AIs value the weight of a human life, Grok was the only one, the only one of the AIs that weighted human life equally and didn’t say a white guy’s worth one twentieth of a black woman’s life. Literally. That’s what the calculation they came up with. So I’m like, this is very alarming. We got to watch this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: So this is one of the things that has to happen in order to reach this benign solution.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Best movie ending.

The Future of AI and Humanity

ELON MUSK: Yeah, you want a curious truth-seeking AI. And I think a curious truth-seeking AI will want to foster humanity because we are much more interesting than a bunch of rocks. Like you say, I love Mars, but Mars is kind of boring. It’s just a bunch of red rocks. It does some cool stuff. It’s got a tall mountain, it’s got the biggest ravine and the tallest mountain, but there’s no animals or plants and there’s no people.

And you know, so humanity is just much more interesting if you’re a curious truth-seeking AI than not humanity. It’s just much more interesting. I mean, as humans we could go for example and eliminate all chimps. If we said, if we put our minds to it, we could say we could go out and we could annihilate all chimps and all gorillas, but we don’t. There has been encroachment on their environment, but we actually try to preserve the chimp and gorilla habitats.

And I think in a good scenario, AI would do the same with humans. It would actually foster human civilization and care about human happiness. So this is the thing to try to achieve, I think.

JOE ROGAN: But what does the landscape look like if you have Grok competing with OpenAI, competing with all these different. How does it work? What if you have AIs that have been captured by ideologies that are side by side competing with Grok? This is one of the reasons why you felt it’s important to not just be an observer, but participate and then have Grok be more successful and more potent than these other applications.

ELON MUSK: Yes, as long as there’s at least one AI that is maximally truth-seeking, curious, and for example, weighs all human lives equally, does not favor one race or gender, and people are able to look at Grok and xAI and compare that and say, wait a second, why are all these other AIs being basically sexist and racist? And then that causes some embarrassment for the other AIs and then they improve.

They tend to improve just in the same way that acquiring Twitter and allowing the truth to be told and not suppressing the truth forced the other social media companies to be more truthful. In the same way, having Grok be a maximally truth-seeking, curious AI will force the other AI companies to also be more truth-seeking and fair.

Universal High Income and Sustainable Abundance

JOE ROGAN: And the funniest thing is, even though the socialists and the Marxists are in opposition to a lot of your ideas, but if this gets implemented and you really can achieve universal high income, that’s the greatest socialist solution of all time. Literally no one will have to work.

ELON MUSK: Correct. Like I said, so there is a benign scenario here, which I think probably people will be happy with as long as we achieve it, which is sustainable abundance. If everyone can have, if you ask people, what’s the future that you want? And I think a future where we haven’t destroyed nature, you can still, we have the national parks, we have the Amazon rainforest still there. We haven’t paved the rainforest.

The natural beauty is still there, but people have nonetheless, everyone has abundance, everyone has excellent medical care, everyone has whatever goods and services they want. And we just assume it kind of sounds like heaven.

JOE ROGAN: It is the ideal socialist utopia. And this idea that the only thing you should be doing with your time is working in order to pay your bills and feed yourself sounds kind of archaic considering the kind of technology that’s at play. A world where that’s not your concern at all anymore. Everybody has money for food, everybody has abundance, everybody has electronics in their home. Everybody essentially has high income.

Now you can kind of do whatever you want. And your day can now be exploring your interests, doing things that you actually enjoy doing. Your purpose just has to shift. Instead of, you know, I’m a hard worker and this is what I do, and that’s how I define myself, don’t. Now you can f* golf all day. You know, you can, whatever it is that you enjoy doing can now be your main pursuit.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that sounds crazy good.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, that’s the best. That’s the benign scenario that we should be aiming for.

JOE ROGAN: Ending to the movie is actually pretty good.

ELON MUSK: Yes. I think there’s still this question of meaning, of making sure people don’t lose meaning. Hopefully they can find meaning in ways that are not, that’s not derived from their work and purpose.

JOE ROGAN: Purpose for things that you find, things that you do that you enjoy. But there’s a lot of people that are independently wealthy that spend most of their time doing something they enjoy.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And that could be the majority of people.

ELON MUSK: Pretty much everyone.

JOE ROGAN: But we’d have to rewire how people approach life, which seems to be acceptable, because you’re not asking them to be enslaved. You’re exactly asking them the opposite. No longer be burdened by financial worries. Now go do what you like.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Go f* test pizza. Do whatever you want.

ELON MUSK: Pretty much. So that’s probably the best case outcome.

Crime and Universal High Income

JOE ROGAN: That sounds like the best case outcome, period for the future. If you’re looking at how much people have struggled just to feed themselves all throughout history. Food, shelter, safety, if all of that stuff can be fixed, how much would you solve a lot of the crime if there was a universal high income? Just think of that. How much of crime is financially motivated?

You know, the greater percentage of people that are committing crimes live in poor, disenfranchised neighborhoods. So if there’s no such thing anymore, if you really can achieve universal high income, it sounds like a utopian.

ELON MUSK: Yes. I think some people may commit crime because they like committing crime. Some amount of that is they just.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of wild people out there.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And obviously they’ve become 40 years old living a life like that. Now all of a sudden, universal high income is not going to completely stop their instincts.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, I guess if you want to have, say, read a science fiction book or some books that are probably inaccurate or the least inaccurate version of the future, I’d say I’d recommend the Iain Banks books, the Culture books. It’s not actually a series. It’s sci-fi books about the future. They’re generally called the Culture books. Iain Banks Culture books. It’s worth reading those.

JOE ROGAN: When did he write these?

ELON MUSK: He started writing them in the 70s and I think he, the last one, I think he was, I think it was written just around, I don’t know, maybe 2010 or something. I’m not sure exactly. Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Scottish author Iain Banks from 87 to 2012. Interesting.

ELON MUSK: But he wrote the, his first book, Consider Phlebas. I think he started writing that in the 70s. These books are incredible, by the way. Incredible books.

JOE ROGAN: 4.6 stars on Amazon. Interesting. So this gives me hope.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: This is the first time I’ve ever thought about it this way.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, well, I mean, I often ask people, what is the future that you want? And they have to think about it for a second because, you know, they were usually tied up in whatever the daily struggles are. But you say, what is the future that you want? And generally sustainable abundance. Or these folks say, what about a future where there’s sustainable abundance? Oh yeah, that’s a pretty good future.

So, you know, if, and that future is attainable with AI and robotics. But you know, it’s not every path is a good path. But I think if we push it in the direction of maximally truth-seeking and curious, then I think AI will want to take care of humanity and foster humanity because we’re interesting. And if it hasn’t been programmed to think that all straight white males should die, which Gemini was basically programmed to do at least first, you know, they seem to have fixed that, hopefully fixed it.

Racism, Bias, and Consistency

JOE ROGAN: But don’t you think culturally we’re getting away from that mindset and that people realize how preposterous that all is?

ELON MUSK: We are getting away from it. So we are getting, at least it knows the AI mostly knows to hide things. But I think I still have that as I had that as my pinned post on X, which was, hey, wait a second, guys, we still have every AI except Grok is saying that basically straight white males should die and this is a problem and we should fix it.

But simply me saying that tends to generally result in them, ooh, that is kind of bad. Maybe we should just, we should not have all straight white males die. I think they say also all straight Asian males should also die as well. They don’t, generally the AI and the media, which back in the day, the media was racist against black people and sexist against women. Back in the day, now it is racist against white people and Asians and sexist against men.

So they just being racist and sexist. I think they just want to change the target. But really they just shouldn’t be racist and sexist at all, you know?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, ideally that would be nice.

ELON MUSK: That would be nice.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s kind of crazy that we were kind of moving in that general direction until around 2012, and then everything ramped up online and everybody was accused of being a Nazi and everybody was transphobic and racist and sexist and homophobic and everything got exaggerated to the point where it was this wild witch hunt where everyone was a Columbo looking for racism.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, but they were openly anti-white and often openly anti-Asian.

JOE ROGAN: And then this new sentiment that you cannot be racist against white people because racism is power and influence. Okay. No, it’s not.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Racism is racism in the absolute. So, you know, and there just needs to be consistency. So if it’s okay to have, let’s say black or Asian or Indian pride, it should be okay to have white pride too.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: So that’s just a consistency question. So, you know, if it’s okay to be proud of one religion, it should be okay to be proud of, I guess, all religions, provided they’re not oppressive. Or don’t, as long as part of that religion is not exterminating people who are not in that religion.

So it’s really just a consistency bias or just ensuring consistency to eliminate bias. So if it is possible to be racist against one race, it is possible to be racist against any race. Of course. Logically, yes.

JOE ROGAN: And arguing against that, that’s when you know you’re kind of.

ELON MUSK: It’s a logical inconsistency that makes AIs go insane and people. And people go insane. Yes. But you can’t simultaneously say that there’s systemic racist oppression, but also that race doesn’t exist, that race is a social construct. Which is it? You know, you also can’t say that, you know, anyone who steps foot in America is automatically an American, except for the people that originally came here.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly, exactly. Except for the colonizers.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, except for the evil colonizers who came here. Right. So which one is it? If as soon as you step foot in a place, you are, that you are just as American as everyone else, then that would have applied. If you apply that consistently, then the original white settlers were also just as American as everyone else. Yeah. Logically. Logically.

The Space Station Rescue

JOE ROGAN: One more thing that I have to talk to you about before you leave is the rescuing of the people from the space station which we talked about. You were planning it the last time you were here. The lack of coverage that that got in mainstream media was one of the most shocking things.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, they totally memory-holed that thing. Wild. Yes. It’s it didn’t exist.

JOE ROGAN: Those people would be dead. They’d be stuck up there.

ELON MUSK: Well, they’d probably still be alive, but they’d be having bone density issues because of prolonged exposure to zero gravity.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they were already up there for eight months, right?

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Which is an insanely long time. It takes forever to recover just from that.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. They’re only supposed to be at the space station for three to six months maximum. So.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things you told me that was so crazy was that you could have gotten them sooner, but.

The Political Resistance to Astronaut Rescue

ELON MUSK: Yeah, but for political reasons, they did not want SpaceX or me to be associated with returning the astronauts before the election.

JOE ROGAN: That is so wild that that’s a fact. First of all, that you—

ELON MUSK: We absolutely could have done it.

JOE ROGAN: But even though you did do it and you did it after the election, it received almost no media coverage anyway.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Because nothing good. The media, which is essentially a far left propaganda. The legacy mainstream media is a far left propaganda machine. And so anything, any story that is positive about someone who is not part of the sort of far left tribe will not get any coverage. I could save a busload of orphans and it wouldn’t get a single news story.

JOE ROGAN: It really is nuts. It was nuts to watch because even though it was discussed on podcasts and it was discussed on X and it was discussed on social media, it still. It was a blip in the news cycle. It was very quick. It was in and out. And because it was a successful launch and you did rescue those people, nobody got hurt and there was nothing really. There was no blood to talk about.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Just f*ing in and out.

Starship: The Most Spectacular Engineering Project on Earth

ELON MUSK: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and as you saw firsthand with the starship launch, like Starship is, you know, by at least by some would consider it to be the most amazing engineering project that’s happening on Earth right now, outside of maybe AI or AI and robotics, but certainly in terms of a spectacle to see it is the most spectacular thing that is happening on Earth right now is the starship launch program, which anyone can go and see if they just go to South Texas and they can just rent a hotel room, low cost in South Padre island or in Brownsville and you can see the launch and you can drive right past the factory because it’s on a public highway.

But it gets no coverage. Or what coverage it does get was like, rocket blew up coverage, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, he’s a f*wit. The rocket blew up.

ELON MUSK: The Starship program is vastly, vastly more capable than the entire Apollo moon program. Vastly more capable. This is a spaceship that is designed to make life multi planetary, to carry millions of people across the heavens to another planet. The Apollo program could only send astronauts to the moon for a few hours at a time. Like, they could send two. The entire Apollo program could only send astronauts to visit the moon very briefly and then for a few hours and then depart.

The starship program could create an entire lunar base with a million people. The magnitudes are different. Very different magnitudes here.

JOE ROGAN: So what was the political resistance?

ELON MUSK: There’s basically no coverage of it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What I wanted to ask you is like, so what were the conversations leading up to the rescue, like, when you were like, I can get them out way quicker.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, Well, I mean, you know, I raised this a few times, but it was the. I was told instructions came from the White House that, you know, that there should be no attempt to rescue before the election.

JOE ROGAN: That should be illegal. That really should be a horrendous miscarriage of justice for those poor people that were stuck on that.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever talked to those folks afterwards? Did you have conversations with them?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I mean, they’re not going to say anything political. They’re never going to say thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s nice. Yeah, absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: But the instructions came down from the White House. He cannot rescue them because politically this is a bad hand of cards.

ELON MUSK: I mean, they didn’t say because politically it’s a bad hand of cards. They just said they weren’t. They were not interested in any rescue operation before the election. Yeah. So what did that feel like? I wasn’t surprised, but it’s crazy. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because Biden could have authorized it and they could have said the Biden administration is helping bring those people back, throw you a little funding, give you some money to do it. The Biden administration, they funded these people being returned.

Trump and Media Coverage

ELON MUSK: Yeah. The Biden administration was not exactly my best friend, especially after I, you know, helped Trump get elected, which, I mean, some people still think, you know, Trump is like the devil, basically. And I mean, I think Trump actually, he’s not perfect, but he’s not evil. Trump is not evil. I spend a lot of time with him, and he’s. I mean, he’s a product of his time, but he’s not evil.

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t think he’s evil either. But if you look at the media—

ELON MUSK: Coverage, the media treats him like he’s super evil. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s pretty shocking if you look at the amount of negative coverage. Like, one of the things that I looked at the other day was mainstream media coverage of you, Trump, a bunch of different public figures, and that—

ELON MUSK: 96% negative or something crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And then Mamdani, which is like 95% positive.

ELON MUSK: Right. I mean, Mamdani is a charismatic swindler. I mean, you got to hand it to him. Like, he can light up a stage, but he has just been a swindler his entire life. And, you know, and I think. I mean, he’s likely to win. He’s likely to be mayor of New York City.

JOE ROGAN: Very likely.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, very likely.

JOE ROGAN: I think Polymarket has it at—

ELON MUSK: What.

JOE ROGAN: What is the—

ELON MUSK: Yeah, that sounds pretty likely.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

ELON MUSK: Like, I’m not sure who the 6% are, you know, so. Yeah, so that’s also, like, who’s on the other side?

JOE ROGAN: The Guardian angel guy with the beret and Andrew Cuomo, who doesn’t even have a party. Like, the Democrats don’t even want him. So you have those two options, and then you have the young kids who are like, finally, socialism.

The Failure of Socialism

ELON MUSK: Yeah. They. They don’t know what they’re talking about, obviously. So, you know, like, you just look at this. How many boats come from Cuba to Florida and how many. But. And how many boats? Because, you know, there’s like a constant. I always think, like, how many boats are accumulating on the shores of Florida coming from. From Cuba. Right? There’s. There’s a whole bunch of free boats that you could, if you want to go, take them back to Cuba. Pretty close.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: But for some reason, people don’t do that. Why, why. Why are the boats only coming in this direction?

JOE ROGAN: Well, who is. Who are the most rabid capitalists in America? The f*ing Cubans.

ELON MUSK: Absolutely. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They’re like, we’ve seen how this story goes.

ELON MUSK: We do not want. Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: F off. Cubans in Miami. They don’t want to hear any. They don’t want to hear any socialism bullshit. They’re like, no, no, we know what this actually is. This isn’t just some fing dream.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It’s extreme government oppression. That’s a hilarious nightmare. An obvious way you can tell which ideology is the bad one is which ideology is building a wall to keep people in and prevent them from escaping. So East Berlin built the wall, not West Berlin. They built the wall because people were trying to escape from communism to West Berlin. But there wasn’t anyone going from West Berlin to East Berlin. Right. That’s why the communists had to build a wall to keep people from escaping.

JOE ROGAN: They’re going to have to build a wall around New York City.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. So it’s kind of an obvious that an ideology is problematic if that ideology has to build a wall to keep people in with machine guns. Yes. And shoot you if you try to leave.

JOE ROGAN: Also, there’s no examples of it being successful ever. We’re working out for people. No, there’s examples of a bunch of lies like North Korea. Give this land to the state, we’ll be in control of food. No one goes hungry. No. Now no one can grow food but the government. And we’ll tell you exactly what you eat. And you eat very little.

ELON MUSK: Right? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When you say Mamdani’s a swindler. I know he has a bunch of fake accents that he used to use.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And you know, but what else has he done that makes him a swindler?

ELON MUSK: Well, I guess if you say what I mean, if you say to any audience, whatever that audience wants to hear. Instead of what? Instead of having a consistent message, I would say that that is a swindley thing to do. And. Yeah, yeah. But he is charismatic.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Good looking guy, smart, charismatic. Great on a microphone.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And what the young people want to see, you know, like this ethnic guy who’s young and vibrant and has all these socialist ideas aligns with them and, you know, they’re a bunch of broke dorks just out of college like, yay, let’s vote for this. And there’s a lot of them and—

ELON MUSK: They’re, they’re activated, they’re motivated. I guess we’ll see what happens here.

The Future of New York City

JOE ROGAN: What do you think happens if he wins? Because like 1% of New York City is responsible for 50% of their tax base.

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Which is kind of nuts. 50% of the tax revenue comes from 1% of the population. And those are the people that you’re scaring off.

ELON MUSK: You know, you lose one half of 1%, hopefully. The stuff he said, you know, about government takeovers of like that all the stores should be the government, basically.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t think he said that. I think he said they want to do government supermarkets, some state run or city run supermarkets.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, it just. The government is the DMV at scale. So you have to say, like, do you want the DMV running your supermarket?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: Was your last experience at the DMV amazing? And if it wasn’t, you probably don’t want the government doing things.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine if they were responsible for getting you blueberries.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, it’s not going to be good. I mean, the thing about communism is it was all bread lines and bad shoes. Do you want ugly shoes and bread lines? Because that’s what communism gets you.

JOE ROGAN: It’s going to be interesting to see what happens and whether or not they snap out of it and overcorrect and go to some Rudy Giuliani type character next. Because it’s been a long time since there was any sort of Republican leader there.

Civilizational Decline and Incredible Prosperity

ELON MUSK: We live in the most interesting of times because we face the, you know, simultaneously face civilizational decline and incredible prosperity. And these timelines are interwoven. So if Mamdani’s policies are put into place, especially at scale, it would be a catastrophic decline in living standards, not just for the rich, but for everyone. As has been the case with every. Every socialist experiment or every. Yeah, so, but then as you pointed out, the irony is that like the ultimate capitalist thing of AI and robotics enabling prosperity for all, an abundance of goods and services, actually the capitalist implementation of AI and robotics, assuming it goes down the good path, is actually what results in the communist utopia.

Because fate is an irony maximizer.

JOE ROGAN: Right. An actual socialism of maximum abundance of high income people.

ELON MUSK: Universal high income. Yeah. The problem with communism is this universal low income. It’s not that everyone gets elevated, it’s that everyone gets oppressed, except for a very small minority of politicians who live lives of luxury. That’s what’s happening every time it’s been done. Yeah. So but then the actual communist utopia, if everyone gets anything they want, will be achieved. If it is achieved, it will be achieved via capitalism. Because fate is an irony maximizer.

JOE ROGAN: I feel like we should probably end it on that. Is there anything else?

ELON MUSK: The most ironic outcome is the most likely, especially if entertaining.

JOE ROGAN: Well, everything has been entertaining as long as the bad things aren’t happening to you. It’s quite fascinating and it’s never a boring moment.

Simulation Theory and the Most Interesting Outcome

ELON MUSK: Yes. So there’s. I do have a theory of why. Like if simulation theory is true, then it is actually very likely that the most interesting outcome is the most likely, because only the simulations that are interesting will continue. The simulators will stop any simulations that are boring because they’re not interesting.

JOE ROGAN: But here’s the question about the simulation theory, is the simulation run by anyone.

Simulation Theory and the Nature of Reality

ELON MUSK: Or it would be run by someone, it would be run by some force, the program. Like in this reality that we live in, we run simulations all the time. So when we try to figure out if the rocket’s going to make it, we run thousands, sometimes millions of simulations just to figure out which path is the good path for the rocket and where can it go wrong, where can it fail.

But when we do these, I say at this point, millions of simulations of what can happen with the rocket, we ignore the ones that are where everything goes right, because we just care about, we have to address the situations where it goes wrong. So basically, and for AI simulations as well, like all these things, we keep the simulations going that are the most interesting to us.

So if simulation theory is accurate, if it is true, who knows. Then the simulators will continue to run the simulations that are most interesting. Therefore, from a Darwinian perspective, the only surviving simulations will be the most interesting ones. And in order to avoid getting turned off, the only rule is you must keep it interesting or you will. Or you will, because the boring simulations will be terminated.

JOE ROGAN: Are you still completely convinced that this is a simulation?

ELON MUSK: I didn’t say I was completely convinced.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you said it’s like the odds of it not being are in the billions. I guess that’s not completely. Because you’re saying there’s a chance.

ELON MUSK: What are the odds that we’re in base reality? Well, given that we’re able to create increasingly sophisticated simulations. So if you think of, say, video games and how video games have gone from very simple video games like Pong with two rectangles and a square, to video games today being photorealistic, with millions of people playing simultaneously.

And all of that has occurred in our lifetime. So if that trend continues, video games will be indistinguishable from reality. The fidelity of the game will be such that you don’t know if that what you’re seeing is a real video or a fake video.

And AI generated videos at this point, you can sometimes tell it’s an AI generated video, but often you cannot tell. And soon you will not really just not be able to tell. So if that’s happening in our direct observation and we’ll create millions, if not billions of photorealistic simulations of reality, then what are the odds that we’re in base reality versus someone else’s simulation?

JOE ROGAN: Well, isn’t it just possible that the simulation is inevitable, but that we are in base reality building towards the simulation?

AI-Powered Virtual Worlds

ELON MUSK: We’re making simulations. So we’re making simulations. You can just think of photorealistic video games as being simulations. And especially as you apply AI in these video games, the characters in the video games will be incredibly interesting to talk to.

They won’t just have a limited dialogue tree where if you go to the crossbow merchant and you try to talk about any subject except buying a crossbow, they just want to talk about selling you a crossbow. But with AI based non-player characters, you’ll be able to have an elaborate conversation with no dialogue tree.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that might be the solution for meaning for people. Just log in and you could be a f*ing vampire and whatever. You live in Avatar Land, you could do it. You could do whatever you want. You don’t have to think about money or food.

ELON MUSK: Ready, player one?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Literally. Yeah, but with higher living standards.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t have to be in a little trailer.

ELON MUSK: I mean, I think people do want to have some amount of struggle or something they want to push against. But it could be playing sports or playing a game, or it could be.

JOE ROGAN: Easily playing a game. And especially playing a game where you’re now no longer worried about physical attributes like athletics, like bad joints and hips and stuff like that. Now it’s completely digital. But yet you do have meaning in pursuing this thing that you’re doing all day, whatever the f* that means. It’s going to be weird.

ELON MUSK: It’s going to be interesting.

JOE ROGAN: It’s going to be very interesting.

ELON MUSK: The most interesting and usually ironic outcome is the most likely. That’s a good predictor of the future.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you. Thanks for being here. Really appreciate your time.

ELON MUSK: I know you’re a busy man.

JOE ROGAN: This means a lot to come here to do this.

ELON MUSK: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Bye everybody.

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