Elon Musk (Full Interview) | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

My first guest is the man who made electric cars a thing and is currently working on perfecting reusable rockets, space travel, connecting the human brain directly to computers, connecting cities with electromagnetic bullet trains, the Starlink satellite system that's so important to the war in Ukraine, and then on Tuesday, he's going to work on that tunnel thing on traffic. He also tweets a lot. Elon Musk, ladies and gentlemen. Did I get the full order of things that you do in a day there? When I was reading there, I left out the tunnel thing at the end. Do you work on all these? A lot of jobs. Do you do all these things every day? Do you work on all of them in a single day? No, but I do have a long work day. Yeah, so I work a lot. I'm so thrilled you're here because, you know, we do a show where we talk about what changes happen in the world, but we just talk. There's very few people who actually make change happen. You are one of those people, probably. You know, I just want to say I love this audience. Well, you're a likable guy. I mean, they attack you a lot. They do. And you seem to laugh it off, which I think is fantastic. I love it that you have a sense of humor because a guy as important as you who makes changes could use your powers for evil and not good. The fact that... Yeah, absolutely. You could. Of course, I would never use them for evil. No, I know. But the way I know that is because you have a sense of humor. Yeah. You really do. Yeah, you like laughing. You like to be funny. I kill me. As opposed to somebody like Zuckerberg, who I'm not even sure is a real boy. Yeah, I actually love comedy. And actually, you know, like many years ago, I actually was in the audience here and watched your show. Oh, really? Been a long time admirer of your show. Oh, well, thank you. Let me get back to you being a genius. Okay. But that has always been my view is that I was a history major. And when you study history, what you realize is that, you know, there's the great man theory and they talk about kings and princes and queens and presidents. It's really the people in tech who change the world. They're the people who deal the cards, whether it's fire or electricity for good or bad, or the cotton gin or the iPhone or the atom bomb. Those are the cards and the rest of us just play it. Would you agree with that assessment? I think technology is the thing that causes these big step changes in civilization. So obviously, you've got things like, say, the Gutenberg press, before which Right. was very difficult to get books. They were very rare. Even if you had a thirst for knowledge, you really couldn't do anything about it because there were very few books to read. And the internet is something beyond the Gutenberg press, I think. But, you know, when I first saw the internet coming into being in a way that the general public could use it, it felt like the humanity as a whole was developing a nervous system. So previously, the way the information would travel would be via osmosis, one person to another, or one person calling another. But the access to information is very limited. Now with the internet, it's like having a nervous system. It's like any part of humanity has access to almost all the information of humanity. Like you could be in the middle of the Amazon jungle with, say, a Starlink terminal, and have access to more information than the president did in 1980. Right. Well, anything on your phone. Everything. Yeah. Okay. So you are one of these dealers, these people who deal the cards. I deal some memes, too. Yes, you do. So I think a lot of people thought when you bought Twitter that this is kind of an outlier. Like, what doesn't fit with these other things you're doing? I never thought that. Because I think you're dealing with big civilizational issues and problems, and I was right on your page. I think Twitter is one of them. I mean, you have talked about this woke mind virus in really apocalyptic terms. You should explain why you don't think it's hyperbole to say things like it's pushing civilization towards suicide. First of all, what is the woke mind virus? And if we don't deal with this, nothing else can get done. Tell me why you think that. Yeah. So I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech. So those are two of the aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous, is that it's often anti-meritocratic. You can't question things. Even the questioning is bad. So another way, almost anonymous, would be cancel culture. And obviously, people have tried to cancel you many times. Many times. Yeah. I mean, every week. Yeah. From left and right. I've had it from both sides. And it's interesting. You and I are both in that little group of people. Maybe it's a bigger group who are called conservative, who haven't really changed. I don't think of you as a conservative. Yeah. I at least think of myself as a moderate. I've spent a massive amount of my life energy building sustainable energy, electric vehicles and batteries and solar and stuff to help save the environment. It's not exactly far right. No, you drew that diagram once where you're here. I related to that. And the world has changed. Right. I feel the same way. I feel like very often, wokeness is not building on liberalism. It's the opposite of liberalism. I can mention it. Yes, exactly. Many examples where it's the opposite, including free speech. Free speech is extremely important. And it's bizarre that we've come to this point where free speech used to be a left or liberal value. And yet we see from the in courts left a desire to actually censor. And that seems crazy. I mean, I think we should be extremely concerned about anything that undermines the First Amendment. There's a reason for the First Amendment. The First Amendment is because people came from countries where they could not speak freely and where saying certain things would get you thrown into prison. And they were like, well, we don't want that here. And by the way, in many parts of the world, including possible that people might think are relatively similar to the United States, the speech laws are draconian. England is quite different. I won't name any country, but. England, why are we protecting them? They have no First Amendment. It's very easy to prove libel in England. I wouldn't want to say the wrong thing or yes, you could be sued easier. I mean, there are in France, I think if you deny the Holocaust, which I think is abhorrent, but I also think it should be part of free speech. You can be thrown into jail. OK, so this I really can't emphasize this enough. We must we must protect free speech. And free speech only matters. It's only relevant when it's someone you don't like. Saying something like because obviously the speech that you like is, you know, it's easy. So it's and it's the thing about censorship is that for those who would advocate it, just remember at some point that will return on you. So this woke mind virus, how did it start? Was it bats? Was it a escape from the lab? I mean, what is your assessment of what? Because it's fairly recent. Why did why? How did it start and why? I was I was trying to figure out where where it's coming from. I think it's actually been a long time brewing in that it's I think it's been going on for a while. And the amount of indoctrination that's happening in schools and universities is, I think, far beyond what parents realize. And I only sort of came to realize this somewhat late. The experience that we had in high school and college is not the experience that that kids that they are having and hasn't been for, I don't know, 10 years, maybe 20 years. So are parents themselves also a big part of the problem? Well, I suppose in some cases that parents, but I think like the parents are just generally not aware of what their kids are being taught or what they're not being taught. They're letting the kids think that they're equal. I mean, yeah, let me give you an example that a friend of mine told me, which his daughters go to college and go to high school in the Bay Area. And and he was asking them, like, well, so who are the you know, who are the first few presidents of the United States? They could name Washington. But so what do you know about him? Well, he was a slave owner. What else? Right. Exactly. Nothing. Right. Like, OK, that's maybe you should know more than that. You know? Yeah. Yeah. And that that is the woke mind virus. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. It's like, you know, the slavery is obviously a horrific institution, but we should still know more about George Washington than that. And by the way, one that was practiced all over the world forever since the beginning of time by every race, including people of color. I'm sorry to tell you that it's huge in the Bible. Absolutely. So the Bible loves it. We're. Yes, they're quite strict about like, you know, don't take someone else's slave and that kind of. Right. But no one ever says just don't do it. They don't. They don't. At no point does it say slavery is bad in the Bible. No, they do not condemn it at all. They just. So. So. So it's. But Twitter is not doing bad. Right. I mean, I saw today that Tucker Carlson. Yeah. Recently fired. You were just on his show and he lost his job. So I hope this isn't an. Yeah. Yeah. But the angel of death. Yeah, exactly. I'm not the typhoid Mary of talk shows. For some reason, people just get fired after his rant yesterday or today on Twitter. I was yesterday or something or did more than than every cable news monologue or something like that. Is that right? Well, Twitter has a tremendous audience. So there's 250 million people that spend an average of half an hour a day on Twitter. So it's about 120 to 130 million user hours per day. And it's been increasing. So the we didn't do anything to be clear. We did nothing special whatsoever. I learned about it afterwards that he had posted something on Twitter. So it's just the Twitter has a lot of people's attention. So and it tends to be the people that are that read a lot or are interested in current events and generally are pretty influential. So for most of the people who tweet are the same people. Right. I mean, the people actually tweet as opposed to just reading it. Yeah. I feel like that's I've read this many times. That's a very, very small percentage of the people on Twitter. And it seems like. Yeah. See, here's why I don't tweet anymore, because you may be the mayor of tweet and I'm glad and I like it that the mayor likes my jokes. But the reason I don't do it anymore is because the mob of mean girls is still there. And that has not changed. It's too easy to get canceled. And I don't even know what pisses them off. They're so nuts. These kids. I feel like I'm walking on a roof with a blindfold. I could fall off any time. Yeah, that was the most innocuous thing. But it's like, you know, I said George Washington was a great president. Well, how dare you? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Had some flaws, but. So how do you fix that? Instrumental in the creation of the United States? So, yeah, well, you have to say, like, what does canceled mean? You know, I mean, yes, people attack on Twitter. That's one thing. But frankly, that's just going to increase engagement. So I would just ignore it. Well, that's easy for you because they can't take your job away or any of your 10 jobs. But they could take mine. And they did once, by the way. Yeah. So fair. You know, I was like literally canceled. Yeah, I mean, like the show is canceled. But OK, so you were in Congress at Congress the other day talking with Chuck Schumer about AI. I'm very interested in this because you've been on this for years. I've always thought you were right about this. I think you're right about almost everything. I mean, let's have more babies and raise them on Mars. I don't get that. But, OK, well, I just think we should be cautious about civilizational decline with it. And we have plummeting birth rates in most places. Yeah, right. And also plummeting resources. No, no. We resource will be fine. But they're not. I know a lot about not fine now. Look, I'm not suggesting complacency, but we do want to move to a sustainable energy economy as quickly as possible. But we're not in any danger of resource collapse. But lots of people don't have enough food or water, water. We will run out of water. They're running. We're running out of sand. Now, this earth is 70 percent water by surface area. And you can't drink that desalination is absurdly cheap. Why don't we do it? We do. It is. You have a lot of free time. It is done. There is a lot of desalination done. OK, but there's plenty of water. This is not an issue. I want to be clear. All right. So but let's talk about AI, because like you were you were on this tip 10 years ago when nobody else was that. And I always thought he's right. Why? Because I've seen too many movies, everything that happens in movies that happens in real life. And, you know, if you make things that are way smarter than you, why wouldn't they become your overlords? So what did you say to Chuck Schumer? And what are we doing about this? I know you want to pause in AI because in the just in the last six months with chat GPT, which came from a company you started. Yes. Well, I mean, a friend of mine has a sort of modification of Occam's razor, you know, you know, sort of the simplest thing being the most likely that like the most ironic outcome is most likely. Right. Yes. So with respect to AI, I just think we should be we should have some sort of regulatory oversight. So, you know, for anything that is a danger to the public, if it's sort of aircraft, cars, food and drug and whatnot, we've got some regulatory oversight, like a referee, essentially, and making sure that companies don't cut corners. So I think that's since if one agrees that AI is a potential risk to the public, then there should be some regulatory body that oversees what companies are doing so that they don't cut corners and potentially do something very dangerous. That's. And if we don't do something, lay out a scenario for me in the next two, five, 10 years, if nothing is done, because we're very good at doing nothing, especially when it comes in the way of profit. And this is a big profit engine now for companies. They're going to want to just compete with each other. I mean, there are people like Ray Kurzweil who doesn't think it's a problem at all. Actually, Ray Kurzweil's prediction for artificial superintelligence is 2029. He's not far off. Right. But he doesn't think it's a problem, whereas people like you and Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking thought, think it's a problem. Yeah, it depends if some people want to live forever or for a much longer period of time, and they see AI as the only way or digital superintelligence as the only thing that can figure out how to get them to live forever. I think Kurzweil is in that category. So he would prefer to have artificial general intelligence than not because it can figure out longevity. So are you optimistic? I read in your Rolling Stone article back in the day that you said you can never be happy unless you're in love. Well, you can be half happy, I suppose. I mean, there's two things. I think to be most happy if you're happy in love and you love your work, then you'll be, I think, fully happy if you lack either of those two. If you have one of those two things, you'll be half happy, you know, roughly. I feel like the theme in a lot of your works that connect all these different things is connecting. Like you want to connect things. You know, you want to connect on the Hyperloop and you want to connect this to Mars and even connect four. I love that game. What? Connect four, you know. Sorry, this is a comedy, right? You know, they'll throw some comedy in there. It's hard for you because when you bought Twitter, you're kind of doing what you did when you took over, when you started Tesla. You lived at the factory, right? I feel like that's your pattern. You get into this thing and then you got to live at the factory to make it work. You've been back and you moved to Texas, then you went back up to San Francisco because of Twitter. I was living in the library of Twitter for a while, yes. But I think things are reasonably stabilized right now. It was just on the fast track to bankruptcy after the acquisition, so I had to take drastic action. There wasn't any choice. I'm just saying it's hard for a woman. When the guy lives at the factory. Yes. That could be a stumbling block. Yes. My concern with Twitter was that it is somewhat of the digital town square and it's important that there be both the reality and perception of trust for a wide range of viewpoints. There was a lot of censorship going on. We uncovered a lot of that with the Twitter files, including a lot of government-driven censorship. It seems that that's got to be a constitutional violation, what was going on there. Since I'm an avid Twitter user, I could detect that something's not right here. That's really why I did the acquisition. It wasn't because I thought this was an easy way to make money or something like that. Being mayor of TweetTown or whatever, it's definitely like there's a lot of arrows pointed at you or flying at you. Of course. But you seem to handle that okay. I hope you do because look, geniuses are going to be a little quirky sometimes, but your heart is always in the right place. You were trying to fix this world. Look, I could talk to you forever. We can't today. I'd love to get high with you. I know a great place to do it. But I can't tell you how much I appreciate you. I know you have a lot of choices and places you can go. Thank you, Elon Musk, ladies and gentlemen. All right. I'll see you soon, Elon.