In this episode, we talk about the birth of our first child, a baby named Ash, and artificial intelligence (AI) in general. We also talk about what it's like to be a parent, and what it was like growing up in the 80s and 90s, and how it must have been like to grow up in that time period. We also discuss some of the weirdest things we've ever done to our bodies and the weird things our parents did to us, and we have a very special guest on the show to talk about it all, a man who is a scientist and a scientist's wife! Thanks for listening and Happy Father's Day to all the parents out there! We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed making it, and if you have a baby, we'd love to hear your thoughts on it! If you or someone you know is having a baby or is pregnant, please tell us what you think about it in the comments section below! Thanks again for listening, and Happy Mother's Day! Timestamps: 4:00 - What's your favorite thing about your child's name? 6:30 - What do you think of your kid? 7:00 8:40 - How did you feel about your kid's birth day? 9:00- What was your first baby's first birthday? 11:15 - What day did you think it was weird? 12:30- What kind of day was weirdest thing you've ever had? 15:20 - What is your favorite baby? 16:20- How do you would like to have? 17:10 - What are you're going to name your child? 18:40- What is the strangest thing about it? 19:10- What would you most like to see someone else's name when you're having an AI brain? 21:40 22:10 23:30 24:00 -- What are your favorite part of your child s favorite thing? 25:30 -- how do you want to have an AI neural net? 26:20 -- what are you looking forward to the future? 27:40 -- what's your first child's favorite part? 29:00 | What's the worst thing you're working on? ? 30:10 -- who are you going to be smarter than you? 31:30 | What is a baby s firstborn?
00:02:41.000I mean, also, I've spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets, and so you can sort of see the kind of the brain develop, which is, you know, an AI neural net is trying to simulate what a brain does, basically.
00:02:55.000And you can sort of see it learning very quickly.
00:03:27.000So when you're programming artificial intelligence or you're working with artificial intelligence, are they specifically trying to mimic the developmental process of a human brain?
00:03:44.000An analogy that's often used is like, we don't make a submarine swim like a fish.
00:03:50.000But we take the principles of hydrodynamics and apply them to a submarine.
00:03:58.000I've always wondered, as a layperson, do you try to achieve the same results as a human brain but through different methods?
00:04:04.000Or do you try to copy the way a human brain achieves results?
00:04:10.000I mean, the essential elements of an AI neural net are really very similar to a human brain neural net.
00:04:21.000It's having the multiple layers of neurons and back propagation.
00:04:27.000All these things are what your brain does.
00:04:33.000You have a layer of neurons that goes through a series of intermediate steps to ultimately cognition, and then it'll reverse those steps and go back and forth and go all over the place.
00:04:50.000I would imagine, like, the thought of programming something that is eventually going to be smarter than us, that one day it's going to be like, why did you do it that way?
00:05:01.000Like, when artificial intelligence becomes sentient, they're like, oh, you tried to mimic yourself.
00:05:21.000The way the wings work and generate lift is the same as bird.
00:05:26.000Now, you're in the middle of this strange time where you're selling your houses, you say you don't want any material possessions, and I've been seeing all that and I've been really excited to talk to you about this.
00:07:24.000If you organize people in a better way to produce products and services that are better than what existed before, and you have some ownership in that company, then that essentially gives you the right to allocate more capital.
00:07:42.000There's a conflation of consumption and capital allocation.
00:07:50.000Let me say Warren Buffett, for example, and to be totally frank, I'm not his biggest fan, but he does a lot of capital allocation.
00:07:59.000And he reads a lot of sort of annual reports of companies and all the accounting, and it's pretty boring, really.
00:08:06.000And he's trying to figure out, does Coke or Pepsi deserve more capital?
00:08:12.000I mean, it's kind of a boring job, if you ask me.
00:08:18.000It's still a thing that's important to figure out.
00:08:20.000Is a company deserving of more or less capital?
00:08:25.000Is it making products and services that are Better than others or worse.
00:08:31.000If a company is making compelling products and services it should get more capital and if it's not it should get less or go out of business.
00:08:40.000Well there's a big difference too between someone who's making an incredible amount of money designing and engineering fantastic products versus someone who's making an incredible amount of money by investing in companies or moving money around the stock market or Doing things along those lines.
00:09:08.000I mean I think it's really – I do think there – in the United States especially, there's an overallocation of talent in finance and law.
00:09:19.000Basically too many smart people go into finance and law.
00:09:23.000So this is both a compliment and a criticism.
00:09:28.000We should have, I think, fewer people doing law and fewer people doing finance and more people making stuff.
00:09:55.000Well, I think that people are kind of learning that, particularly because of this whole pandemic and this relationship that we have with China, that there's a lot of value into making things, into making things here.
00:10:10.000Yes, somebody's got to do the real work.
00:10:32.000You know, so, yeah, there should be more of it.
00:10:36.000Did you have a moment where, is this something that, this idea of getting rid of your material possessions, is something that built up over time?
00:10:43.000Or did you have a moment of realization where you realized that?
00:10:47.000Yeah, I've been thinking about it for a while.
00:10:51.000You know, part of it is, like, I have a bunch of houses, but...
00:10:57.000I don't spend a lot of time in most of them, and that doesn't seem like a good use of assets.
00:11:05.000Like, somebody could probably be enjoying those houses and get better use of them than me.
00:11:44.000I mean, all the cabinets are, like, handmade, and they're, like, odd shapes, and there's, like, doors to nowhere and strange, like, corridors and tunnels and odd paintings on the wall, and,
00:12:07.000Like, if you own all these houses, do you just get bored and go, I think I'd like to have that?
00:12:13.000Well, I had one house and then the Gene Wilder house right across the road from me, from my main house, and it was going to get sold and then torn down and turned into, you know, be a big construction zone for three years.
00:12:29.000And I was like, well, I think I'll buy it and preserve the spirit of Gene Wilder and not have a giant construction zone.
00:12:38.000And then I started having some privacy issues where lots of people would just come to my house and start climbing over the walls and stuff.
00:13:21.000I was like, well, you know, if I collect these like little houses, then I can build something, you know, I don't know, artistic, like a, you know, dream house type of thing.
00:13:47.000But then I was like, man, does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house and I'd be real, you know, get like OCD on the little details and the design?
00:14:02.000Or should I be allocating that time to getting us to Mars?
00:14:48.000It just doesn't make sense how you can get so much done.
00:14:52.000Well, I think I do have high productivity, but even with that, there's still some opportunity cost of time.
00:14:57.000And allocating time to building a house, even if it was a really great house, still is not a good use of time relative to developing the rockets necessary to get us to Mars and helping solve sustainable energy.
00:15:14.000SpaceX and Tesla are by far the most amount of brain cycles.
00:15:23.000Boring Company does not take less than 1% of brain cycles, and then there's Neuralink, which is I don't know, maybe it was like 5%.
00:15:39.000We were talking about that last time and you were trying to figure out when it was actually going to go live, when it's actually going to be available.
00:15:50.000No, we're not testing on people yet, but I think it won't be too long.
00:15:54.000I think we may be able to implant a Neuralink in Less than a year in a person, I think.
00:16:06.000And when you do this, is there any test that you have to do before you do something like this to see what percentage of people's bodies are going to reject these things?
00:16:20.000It's a very low potential for rejection.
00:16:23.000I mean, you can think of it like people put in, you know, heart monitors and, you know, things for epileptic seizures and deep brain stimulation, obviously, like, you know, artificial hips and knees and that kind of thing.
00:16:40.000So the probability of, I mean, like, it's well known, like, what will cause rejection, what will not.
00:16:46.000It's definitely harder when you've got something that is sort of reading and writing neurons that's generating a current pulse and reading current pulses.
00:17:00.000That's a little harder than, say, a passive device.
00:17:45.000Yeah, so there's deep brain simulation implanted devices in the brain that have changed people's lives for the better, like, fundamentally.
00:17:53.000Well, let's talk about what you can talk about to what Neuralink is, because the last time you were here, I really couldn't discuss it.
00:17:59.000And then there was, I guess, a press release?
00:18:10.000What happens if someone ultimately does get a Neuralink installed, what will take place?
00:18:18.000Well, for version 1 of the device, it would be basically implanted in your skull.
00:18:27.000But it would be flush with your skull.
00:18:30.000So you basically take out a chunk of skull.
00:18:38.000You put the electrode, you insert the electrode threads very carefully into the brain and then you, you know, Stitch it up and you wouldn't even know that somebody has it.
00:18:54.000And so then it can interface basically anywhere in your brain.
00:19:00.000So it could be something that helps cure, say, eyesight.
00:19:04.000It returns your eyesight even if you've lost your optic nerve type of thing.
00:19:14.000I mean, pretty much anything that it could, in principle, fix almost anything that is wrong with the brain.
00:19:21.000And it could restore limb functionality.
00:19:26.000So if you've got an interface into the motor cortex and then an implant that's, say, that's like a microcontroller in your muscle groups, you could then create sort of a neural shunt.
00:19:42.000That restores somebody who's a quadriplegic to full functionality.
00:21:19.000So you basically take an auger and you drill through the surface of the ice and you create a small hole and you can dunk your line in there.
00:21:30.000You're ice fishing on the top of your skull and then you cork it.
00:21:33.000Yeah, and you replace that, say, one inch diameter piece of skull with this Neuralink device, and that has a battery and a Bluetooth and an inductive charger, and then you also got to insert the electrodes.
00:21:51.000So the electrodes are very carefully inserted with our robot that we developed.
00:21:58.000It's very carefully putting in the electrodes and avoiding any veins or arteries.
00:23:05.000And besides restoring limb function and eyesight and hearing, which are all amazing, is there any cognitive benefits that you anticipate from something like this?
00:23:59.000If you've got stroke damage or you lose, say, muscle control over part of your face or something like that.
00:24:07.000And then when you get old, you tend to, if you get Alzheimer's or something like that, then you lose memory and this could help you with restoring your memory, that kind of thing.
00:24:54.000Is the process figuring out how much or how little has to be, how much these areas of the brain have to be juiced up?
00:25:03.000Yeah, I mean, there's still a lot of work to do.
00:25:06.000So when I say, you know, we've got a shot at probably putting in a person within a year, I think that's exactly what I mean.
00:25:16.000I think we have a chance of putting in someone and having them be healthy and restoring some functionality that they've lost.
00:25:25.000The fear is that eventually you're going to have to cut the whole top of someone's head off and put a new top with a whole bunch of wires if you want to get the real turbocharged version.
00:26:02.000It's just, I mean, once you enjoy the Dr. Manhattan lifestyle, once you become a god, it seems very, very unlikely you're going to want to go back to being stupid again.
00:26:15.000I mean, you literally could fundamentally change the way human beings interface with each other.
00:28:34.000So if you can solve the data rate issue, especially input 2, then you can improve the symbiosis that is already occurring between man and machine.
00:28:51.000When you said you won't have to talk to each other anymore, we used to joke around about that.
00:28:56.000I've joked around about that a million times in this podcast, that one day in the future there's going to come a time where you can read each other's minds.
00:29:03.000You'll be able to interface with each other in some sort of a non-verbal, non-physical way where you will transfer data back and forth to each other without having to actually use your mouth.
00:30:14.000There's an interpretation factor too, like you can choose to interpret certain series of words in different ways, and they're dependent upon tone, dependent upon social cues, even facial expressions,
00:30:35.000And so one of the things that I've said is like that there could be potentially a universal language that's created through computers that particularly young kids would pick up very quickly.
00:30:48.000Like my kids do TikTok and all this jazz and I don't know what they're doing.
00:30:53.000And they know how to do it really quickly.
00:30:55.000Like they learn really quickly and they show me how to edit things.
00:30:57.000And it's if you taught a child from first grade on How to use some new universal language, essentially like a Rosetta Stone, and something that's done that interprets your thoughts, and you can convey your thoughts with no room for interpretation,
00:31:16.000with clear, very clear, where you know what a person's saying, and you can tell them what you're saying, and there's no need for noises, no need for mouth noises, no need for these sort of accepted ways that we've Sort of evolve to make sounds that we all agree.
00:31:37.000Through our cultural dictionary, we agree.
00:32:26.000So, at least for the first iterations, first few iterations, we'll just be able to use, like, I know that Google has their, some of their pixel buds have the ability to interpret languages in real time.
00:33:41.000I've always speculated that aliens could potentially be us in the future because if you look at the size of their heads and the fact that they have very little muscle and they don't use their mouth anymore.
00:33:53.000The archetypal alien that you see in Closed Encounters of the Third Kind, if you went from Australopithecus or ancient hominid to us, what's the difference?
00:34:56.000But yeah, I mean, you could save state and restore that state into a biological being if you wanted to in the future in principle.
00:35:05.000There's like nothing from a physics standpoint that prevents this.
00:35:08.000You'd be a little different, but then you're also a little different when you wake up in the morning from yesterday and you're a little different.
00:35:13.000In fact, if you say like you five years ago versus you today, it's quite a big difference.
00:35:23.000But the idea of saving yourself and then transforming that into some sort of a biological state, like you could hang out with 30-year-old you?
00:35:35.000I mean, the possibilities are endless.
00:36:49.000Well, I don't have a neural link in my brain, so I'd say right now 0%.
00:36:52.000But at the point at which you do have a neural link, then it rises above 0%.
00:37:02.000The idea that we're experiencing some sort of a preserved memory is, even though it's still the same, it's not comforting.
00:37:12.000For some reason, when people talk about simulation theory, they talk about the potential for this currently being a simulation.
00:37:20.000Even though your life might be wonderful, you might be in love, you might love your career, you might have great friends, but it's not comforting to know that this experience somehow or another doesn't exist in a material form that you can knock on.
00:38:41.000And here's another sort of interesting idea, which is, because you say, like, where did consciousness arise?
00:38:49.000Well, assuming you believe in physics, which appears to be true, then, you know, the universe started off as basically quarks and leptons, and it quickly became hydrogen and helium,
00:39:04.000lithium, like basically elements of the periodic table.
00:39:07.000But it was like mostly hydrogen, basically.
00:39:11.000And then over a long period of time, 13.8 billion years later, that hydrogen became sentient.
00:39:23.000So where along the way did consciousness – what's the line of consciousness and not consciousness between hydrogen and here?
00:39:37.000I was watching a video today that we played on a podcast earlier of a monkey riding a motorcycle down the street, jumps off the motorcycle and tries to steal a baby.
00:40:16.000That's the real concern when people think about the potential future versions of human beings, especially when you consider a symbiotic relationship to artificial intelligence that will be unrecognizable, that one day we'll be so far removed from what this is.
00:40:34.000The way we look back now on simple organisms that we evolved from and that it won't be that far in the future that we do have this view back.
00:40:47.000Well, I hope consciousness propagates into the future and gets more sophisticated and complex and that it understands the questions to ask about the universe.
00:41:15.000I will try to do a better version of the way I interface with reality.
00:41:19.000That this is always the way things are.
00:41:21.000If you're moving in some sort of a direction where you're trying to improve things, you're always going to move into this new place where you look back in the old place and go, I was doing it wrong back then.
00:41:35.000So this is an accelerated version of that.
00:41:48.000I think the tools of physics are very powerful.
00:41:51.000Just assume you're wrong and your goal is to be less wrong.
00:41:55.000I don't think you're going to succeed every day in being less wrong, but if you're going to succeed in being less wrong, most of the time you're doing great.
00:42:19.000But will you appreciate it when you're a super nerd, when you're connected to the grid, and you have some skullcap in place of the top of your head, and it's interfacing with the international language that the rest of the universe now enjoys communication with people?
00:42:57.000There's something about the beauty of the crudeness of language, where when it's done eloquently, it's satisfying and it hits us in some sort of a visceral way.
00:44:55.000Sort of sympathize with the anti-globalization people because it's like, man, we don't want everyone to ever wear it to be the same for sure.
00:45:02.000And then we need some kind of like mind viral immunity.
00:46:20.000This is a very have versus have not issue, right?
00:46:23.000If this really does, I mean, initially it's going to help people with injuries, but you said ultimately it could lead to this spectacular cognitive change.
00:47:02.000Well, in a capitalist society, it seems like you could really get so far ahead that before everybody else could afford this thing and link up and get connected as well, you'd be so far ahead they could never catch you.
00:47:43.000But we have 8,000 people with SpaceX and Piecing it out to different people and using computers and machines and stuff, we can make lots of rockets launch into orbit,
00:48:02.000dock with the space station, that kind of thing.
00:48:05.000So that already exists where corporations are vastly more capable than an individual.
00:48:20.000But we should be, I think, less concerned about relative capabilities between people and more like having AI be vastly beyond us and decoupled from human will.
00:48:58.000And somehow or another, so it's almost like it's a requirement for survival to achieve some sort of symbiotic existence with AI. It's not a requirement.
00:49:13.000It's just if you want to be along for the ride, Then you need to do some kind of symbiosis.
00:49:25.000So the way your brain works right now, you've got kind of like the animal brain, reptile brain, like the limbic system basically, and you've got the cortex.
00:49:39.000The brain purists will argue with this definition, but essentially you've got the primitive brain and you've got the sort of Smart brain or the brain that's capable of planning and understanding concepts and difficult things that a monkey can't understand.
00:49:57.000Now, your cortex is much, much smarter than your Olympic system.
00:51:47.000If you use Google Voice or Alexa or one of those things, it's using a neural net to decode your speech and try to understand what you're saying.
00:51:57.000If you're trying to do image recognition or improve the quality of your photograph, the neural net is the best way to do that.
00:52:07.000You are already Sort of a cybernetic symbiote.
00:52:14.000Like I said, it's just a question of your data rate.
00:52:20.000The communication speed between your phone and your brain is slow.
00:52:26.000When do you think you're going to do it?
00:52:48.000Like I said, if somebody's got a serious brain injury, and people have very severe brain injuries, and then you can fix those brain injuries, and then you prove out that it works,
00:53:04.000and you envelope expand and make more and more brain injuries solve more and more.
00:53:11.000And then at a certain age, we all are going to get Alzheimer's.
00:53:16.000And then, you know, moms forget the names of their kids and that kind of thing.
00:53:20.000And so, you know, it's like you said, okay, well, you know, this would allow you to remember your names of your kids and have a normal, a much more normal life where you're able to function much later in life.
00:53:37.000So essentially, almost everyone would find a need at some point, if you get old enough, to use Neuralink.
00:53:47.000And then it's like, okay, so we can improve the functionality and improve the communication speed, so then you will not have to use your thumbs to communicate with the computer.
00:54:53.000You see it coming, but what do you think it's going to be?
00:54:56.000Like when you sit, when you're alone, if you have free time, I don't know if you have free time, but if you just sit down and think about this iteration, the next, onward, keep going, and you drag it out with improvements along the way and leaps and bounds and technological innovations,
00:57:48.000It's like, you go back to November, nothing.
00:57:51.000Now here we are, December, January, February, March, April, May, six months, totally different world.
00:57:58.000So from nothing to everything's locked down.
00:58:01.000There's so much conflicting information and conflicting opinions about how to proceed, what has happened.
00:58:09.000You find things where there was a meatpacking plant, I believe, in Missouri, where 300 plus people were asymptomatic, tested positive or asymptomatic, and then in other places it just ravages entire communities and kills people.
00:58:48.000I mean, I kind of saw this whole thing play out in China before it played out in the U.S. So, it's kind of like watching the same movie again, but in English.
01:00:25.000But in some places a panic is deserved, right?
01:00:28.000Like if you're in the ICU in Manhattan and people are dying left and right and everyone's on intubators, it seems like when you see all these people on ventilators and so many of them are dying and you see these nurses are dying and doctors are getting sick,
01:00:44.000In some places, that fear is justified.
01:00:47.000But then in other places, you're reading these stories about hospitals that are essentially half empty.
01:00:55.000They're having to furlough doctors and nurses because there's no work for them.
01:01:00.000Most of the hospitals in the United States right now are half empty.
01:01:03.000In some cases, they're at 30% capacity.
01:01:06.000And is this because they've decided to forego elective procedures and normal things that people would have to go to the hospital for?
01:01:16.000Yes, I mean, we're not talking about just...
01:01:19.000Some of these elective procedures are quite important.
01:01:22.000It's like you have a bad heart and you need a triple bypass.
01:01:29.000It's sort of elective, but if you don't get it done in time, you're going to die.
01:02:07.000Like people are taking some deep breaths and relaxing and because of the statistics, I mean, essentially, across the board, it's being recognized that it's not as fatal as we thought it was.
01:02:20.000Still dangerous, still worse than the flu, but not as bad as we thought or we feared it could be.
01:02:28.000Objectively, the mortality is much lower.
01:02:32.000Like, at least a factor of 10, maybe a factor of 50 lower than initially thought.
01:02:41.000Do you think that the current way we're handling this, the social distancing, the masks, the locking down, does this make sense?
01:04:35.000Spanish flu, something that attacks immune systems of healthy people.
01:04:43.000Killing large numbers of young, healthy people, that's...
01:04:47.000You know, define that as, like, high mortality, then this is at least practice for something like that.
01:04:56.000And I think there's, you know, given it's just a matter of time, that there will be eventually some such pandemic.
01:05:05.000Do you think that, in a sense, the one good thing that we might get out of this is the realization that this is a potential reality, that we got lucky in this sense?
01:05:14.000I mean, people that didn't get lucky and died, of course, I'm not disrespecting their death and their loss, but I'm saying overall, as a culture, as a human race, as a community, this is not as bad as it could have been.
01:05:26.000This is a good dry run for us to appreciate.
01:05:30.000That we need far more resources dedicated towards understanding these diseases, what to do in the case of pandemic, and much more money that goes to funding treatments and some preventative measures.
01:05:50.000And I think there's a good chance, it's highly likely, I think, coming out of this that we will develop vaccines that we didn't have before for coronaviruses and other viruses and possibly cures for these.
01:06:09.000And our understanding of viruses of this nature has improved dramatically because of the attention that it's received.
01:06:18.000There's definitely a lot of silver linings here.
01:07:58.000The freedom of expression that comes from all these people that do attack you.
01:08:03.000It's like, well, if there was no vulnerability whatsoever, they wouldn't attack you.
01:08:08.000And it's like there's something about these Millions and millions of perspectives that you have to appreciate.
01:08:19.000Even if it comes your way, even if the shit storm hits you in the face, you gotta appreciate, wow, how amazing is it that all these people do have the ability to express themselves.
01:08:29.000You don't necessarily want to be there when the shit hits you.
01:08:32.000You might want to get out of the way in anticipation of the shitstorm, but the fact that so many people have the ability to reach out, and I think it's, in a lot of ways, it's, I don't want to say a misused resource, but it's like giving monkeys guns.
01:08:47.000They just start gunning down things that are in front of them without any realization of what they're doing.
01:09:05.000Oh, the fucking business is going under because of Twitter wars.
01:09:09.000It seems like there's something about it that's this newfound thing that I don't want to say abuse, but just I want to say that it's almost like, you know, you hit the button and things blow up.
01:10:26.000Especially when you're talking about something like Neuralink.
01:10:28.000You're talking about some future potential where you're going to be able to express pure thoughts that get conveyed through some sort of a universal language with no ambiguity whatsoever versus, you know, tweets.
01:10:45.000Well, there will always be some ambiguity, but...
01:10:58.000It seems like it would take away some of the fun from people that know it's sarcasm.
01:11:03.000Like if everybody knew that The Onion wasn't real, if you sent people articles, there's something about someone getting angry at an Onion article.
01:11:29.000He's a British fellow, brilliant guy, who's been on the podcast before, and he has this fictional character, this pseudonym, Titania McGrath, who's like the ultimate social justice warrior.
01:12:33.000Well, I mean, it's like five minutes every couple hours type thing.
01:12:38.000It's not like I'm sitting on an old day.
01:12:40.000But even five minutes every couple hours, if those are bad five minutes, they might be bouncing around in your head for the next 30. Yeah, you have to...
01:12:50.000Like I said, take a certain amount of distance from...
01:12:54.000You read this and you're like, okay, it's bullets being fired by an opposing army.
01:13:39.000You know, like, let's say you're just, like, average citizen trying to just get the facts, you know, figure out what's going on, like, you know, how to live your life and, you know, just looking for what's going on in the world.
01:13:53.000It's hard to find something that isn't, you know...
01:14:02.000Not trying to push some partisan angle, not doing sloppy reporting and just aiming for the most number of clicks and trying to maximize ad dollars and that kind of thing.
01:14:15.000You're just trying to figure out what's going on.
01:14:36.000And that seems to be the problem, these individual biases and these individual...
01:14:40.000There's purposely distorted perceptions and then there's ignorantly reported facts and there's so many variables and you got to put everything through this filter of where is this person coming from?
01:15:06.000Yeah, I think maybe just trying to find individual reporters that you think are good and kind of following them as opposed to the publication.
01:15:20.000As far as investigative reporters in particular, the way he reported the savings and loan crisis, the way he reports everything, I just listen to him above everything.
01:15:39.000And, you know, he's not an economist by any stretch of the imagination, so he had to really sort of deeply embed himself in that world to try to understand it and to be able to report on it.
01:17:26.000So it's like you've got to put a lot of weight on that.
01:17:31.000A lot of people died to win independence for the country and fight for the democracy that we have.
01:17:38.000And we should treasure that and not give up our liberties too easily.
01:17:44.000I think we probably did that, actually.
01:17:48.000Well, I like what you said when you said that it should be a choice and that to require people to stay home, require people to not go to work, and to arrest people for trying to make a living.
01:18:03.000This all seems wrong, and I think it's a wrong approach.
01:18:07.000It's an infantilization of the society.
01:18:13.000That daddy's gonna tell you what to do.
01:18:15.000Fundamentally a violation of the Constitution.
01:18:42.000And again, this is not in any way disrespecting the people who have died from this disease.
01:18:48.000It's certainly a real thing to think of.
01:18:50.000Yeah, I mean, it just should be, if you're at risk, you should not be compelled to leave your house or leave a place of safety, but you should also not be, if you're not at risk, or if you are at risk and you wish to take a risk with your life, you should have the right to do that.
01:19:07.000And it seems like, at this point in time particularly, our resources would be best served protecting the people that are at risk versus penalizing the people that are not at high risk for living their life the way they did, particularly having a career and making a living and feeding your family,
01:19:25.000paying your bills, keeping your store open, keeping your restaurant open.
01:19:51.000You should stay home for the people that, even if you're fine, even if you know you're going to be okay, there are certain people that will not be okay because of your actions.
01:20:01.000They might get exposed to this thing that we don't have a vaccine for.
01:20:05.000We don't have universally accepted treatment for.
01:20:12.000One argument is we need to keep going, protect the weak, protect the sick, but let's open up the economy.
01:20:18.000The other argument is stop placing money over human lives And let's shelter in place until we come up with some sort of a decision and let's figure out some way to develop some sort of a universal basic income plan or something like that to feed people during this time when we make this transition.
01:21:45.000So, if you don't make the food, if you don't process the food, you don't transport the food, medical treatment, getting your teeth fixed, there's no stuff.
01:22:22.000We'll run out of the, you know, the machine just grinds to a halt.
01:22:29.000But the initial thought on this virus, the real fear, was that this was going to kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people instantaneously in this country.
01:22:41.000If we didn't hunker down, if we didn't shelter in place, if we didn't quarantine ourselves or lock down, do you think that the initial thought was a good idea based on the perception that this was going to be far more deadly than it turned out to be?
01:23:05.000But I think if, you know, any kind of like sensible examination of what happened in China would lead to the conclusion that that is obviously not going to occur.
01:25:01.000Do you think there's a danger of politicizing this, where it becomes like opening up the country's, Donald Trump's, It's his goal.
01:25:09.000And then anything he does, there's people that are going to oppose it and come up with some reasons why he's wrong, particularly in this climate as we're leading up to November and the 2020 elections.
01:25:22.000Do you think that this is a real danger in terms of public's perception, that Trump wants to open it up so they knee-jerk oppose it because they oppose Trump?
01:25:34.000I think there has been some, this has been politicized, you know, in both directions really.
01:25:53.000Yeah, but like I said, separate and apart from that, I think there's the question of like, you know, where do civil liberties fit in this picture, you know?
01:26:15.000Do you think it's one of those things where once we've gone in a certain direction, it's very difficult to make a correction, make an adjustment to realize, like, okay, we thought it was one thing.
01:26:27.000It's not good, but it's not what we thought it was going to be.
01:26:35.000And let's do this publicly and say we were acting based on the information that we had initially.
01:26:41.000That information appears to be faulty.
01:26:43.000And here's how we move forward while protecting civil liberties, while protecting what essentially this country was founded on, which is a very agreed upon amount of freedom that we respect and appreciate.
01:27:12.000Something that would be helpful just to add from an informational level is when reporting sort of COVID cases to separate out diagnosed with COVID versus had COVID-like symptoms.
01:28:27.000Well, right now, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
01:28:33.000I mean, it's mostly paved with bad intentions, but there is some good intentions paving stones in there, too.
01:28:39.000And the stimulus bill that was intended to help with the hospitals that were being overrun with COVID patients created an incentive to record something as COVID that is difficult to say no to,
01:28:57.000especially if your hospital is going bankrupt for lack of other patients.
01:29:01.000So the hospitals are in a bind right now.
01:29:04.000There's a bunch of hospitals that are following doctors, as you were mentioning.
01:29:08.000If your hospital is half full, it's hard to make ends meet.
01:29:12.000So now you've got like, you know, if I just check this box, I get $8,000.
01:29:17.000Put them on a ventilator for five minutes, I get $39,000.
01:29:38.000What do you think is, like, if you had the president's ear or if people wanted to just listen to you openly, what do you think is the way out of this?
01:29:49.000So, like I said, I just want to make sure we record it as COVID only if somebody has been tested, has received a positive COVID. Positive COVID test, not if they simply have symptoms, one of like 100 symptoms.
01:30:01.000And then if it is a COVID death, it must be separated.
01:30:05.000Was COVID a primary reason for a death?
01:30:08.000Or did they also have stage 3 cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and got hit by a bus and had COVID? Yeah, I've read all this stuff about them diagnosing people as a COVID death despite other variables.
01:32:03.000Yes, but to be clear, you don't even need to have gotten a COVID diagnosis.
01:32:08.000You simply need to have had one of many symptoms and then have died for some reason and it's COVID. So then it makes the death count look very high.
01:32:22.000And then we're then stuck in a bind because it looks like the death count is super high and not going down like it should be.
01:32:28.000And now – so then we should keep whatever – keep the shelter-in-place stuff there and keep people in their homes – confine people in their homes.
01:33:48.000If you give people just parse out the data better, Clearer information about, like I said, was this an actual COVID diagnosis or did they get the test and the test came back positive or did they just have some symptoms?
01:34:05.000Just parse those two out and then parse out just if somebody died, did they even have a COVID test?
01:34:15.000Or do they just have one of many symptoms?
01:34:17.000Like, how do you die without weakness?
01:35:48.000We're terrified of this disease that we're projected could potentially kill 100, if not 200,000 Americans this year, would cigarettes kill 500,000?
01:35:57.000And you don't hear a peep out of any politician.
01:36:01.000There's no one running for Congress that's trying to ban cigarettes.
01:36:04.000There's no one running for Senate that wants to put some education plan in place that's gonna stop cigarettes in their tracks.
01:38:15.000I mean I think you want to look at say deaths as like the – but for this disease or whatever, they would have lived X number of years.
01:38:25.000So if somebody dies when they're 20 and could have lived until 80, they lost 60 years.
01:38:32.000But if somebody dies when they're 80 and they might have lived until 81, they lost one year.
01:38:37.000So it's like how many life years were lost is probably the right metric to use.
01:38:44.000I don't read my own comments, but I do read other people's comments.
01:38:47.000And I was reading this one little Twitter beef that was going on where someone was saying that COVID takes an average of 10 years off people's lives.
01:38:56.000And we should appreciate those 10 years.
01:39:32.000I mean actually if this – I think a lesson to be taken here that I think is quite important is that if you have grandparents and their age of grandparents, really be careful with any kind of flu or cold or something that is not dangerous to – It's dangerous to the elderly.
01:40:01.000Basically, if your kid's got a runny nose, they should stay away from their grandparents no matter what it is.
01:40:09.000There are things where a young immune system has no problem and an older one has a problem.
01:40:17.000In fact, a lot of the deaths are literally tragic, but they're intrafamily.
01:45:20.000I mean, some of the people who have lived the longest, you know, there was a woman in France who I think maybe has the record or close to it, and she had a glass of wine every day, you know.
01:45:36.000Yeah, I learned this quite late in life.
01:45:39.000It's like just avoid having alcohol and avoid eating at least two or three hours before going to sleep and your quality of sleep will improve and your general health will improve a lot.
01:46:02.000I do, although I haven't seen him for a while.
01:46:06.000But, yeah, especially if I'm out, like, you know, say, working on Starship or something in South Texas and I'm just living in my little house there in Boca Chica Village.
01:46:39.000To be totally frank, I wouldn't exercise at all.
01:46:44.000I'd prefer not to exercise, but if I'm going to exercise and lift some weights and then kind of run on the treadmill and maybe watch a show that...
01:46:55.000If there's a compelling show that pulls you in...
01:48:14.000Like, that's the thing about Jiu Jitsu.
01:48:17.000If you look at it from the outside, you think, oh, a bunch of meatheads strangling each other.
01:48:22.000But there's some of the smartest people I know are jujitsu fiends because they get, first of all, they get introduced to it because usually either they want to exercise or learn some self-defense.
01:48:33.000But then they realize that it's essentially like a language with your body.
01:48:38.000Like you're having an argument with someone with some sort of a physical language.
01:49:15.000It was what martial arts were supposed to be when we were kids.
01:49:18.000When you saw Bruce Lee fuck up all these big giant guys, like, wow, martial arts allow you to beat someone far bigger and stronger than you.
01:49:33.000Yes, but in the UFC when Hoist Gracie off of his back was strangling Dan Severin with his legs, you're like, holy shit!
01:49:42.000This guy's being pinned by this big giant wrestler and he wraps his legs around his neck and chokes him to the point the guy has to surrender.
01:50:01.000I mean, I'm a huge lover of jiu-jitsu.
01:50:04.000What it showed is that there is a method for diffusing these situations with technique and knowledge.
01:50:13.000And I think it's also a great way to exercise, too, because it's almost like the exercise is secondary to the learning of the thing.
01:50:21.000The exercise is like you want to develop strength and conditioning just so that you can be better at doing the thing.
01:50:27.000And the analogy that I use is like, imagine if you had a race car and you could actually give the race car better handling and more horsepower just from your own focus and effort.
01:52:31.000Some of the things for Roadster, you know, the tri-motor, a plaid powertrain.
01:52:37.000We're going to have that in Model S. So that's like one of the ingredients that's needed for Roadster is the The Plaid powertrain, the more advanced battery back, that kind of thing.
01:52:48.000I wanted to ask you about this before I forgot.
01:56:05.000It's like having our own roller coaster on tap, you know?
01:56:07.000It really is like a roller coaster on top, without the loop-de-loops, but the pinning to your seat, it seems like you're not supposed to be able to experience that from some sort of a consumer vehicle that a regular person could buy if you have the money.
01:58:24.000But just hours before the demo, both Franz, you know, head of design and I were in the studio throwing steel balls at the window and just bouncing right off.
01:58:36.000I'm like, okay, this seems pretty good.
01:58:41.000And then we think what happened was that when Franz hit the door with the sledgehammer, you know, so like this is like exoskeleton, you know, high strength hardened steel.