The Joe Rogan Experience November 4, 2024 A surprise pre-election episode (the day before the 2024 US vote): AI and robotics, free speech, the Twitter takeover, bureaucracy and democracy — plus Musk's Diablo IV ranking.
A surprise pre-election episode (the day before the 2024 US vote): AI and robotics, free speech, the Twitter takeover, bureaucracy and democracy — plus Musk's Diablo IV ranking.
Transcript Elon Musk
Joe Rogan Podcast.
Joe Rogan
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Elon Musk
But if you want to sort of see like a vision of the future, it's like basically that the, like the top 20 and even the top 100 is like totally dominated by China.
Elon Musk
Yeah, this is like China and a little bit of Korea and Taiwan.
Joe Rogan
So you. And are you in the top 20 in the world or top 20. Wow. In Diablo?
Joe Rogan
Do you want to tell everybody your handle? No, no, don't tell. It's not worth it.
Elon Musk
Well, they actually listed me with my actual name in the, in the list.
Joe Rogan
Oh, did they really? Oh, interesting.
Elon Musk
But yeah, there's only, there's only two Americans in the top 20. The rest, almost everyone is from Asia.
Joe Rogan
Otherwise we were talking about something that I think is a really good. Because people always think that video games are frivolous. But, but what you were saying, I think that's really important is it's so difficult that it requires you to only think about that and it can relieve stress. It can take out the rest of the world because it's so hard, you can only think about that.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean if I play a video game on extreme difficulty, then I have to concentrate fully on the game and it has a calming effect. It sort of chills down. And I mean you mentioned, I think many people like if you play martial arts or you play pool, like something that forces you. It's like, I think anything that forces you to concentrate fully actually has a calming effect. I find it just sort of like kind of a restoring effect mentally. Like it's good.
Joe Rogan
Jiu jitsu's like that. Archery's like that as well. Like when you're shooting a bow, you have to. There's so many moving things and you're trying, you know, you have to think only of it. And it cleans the mind.
Elon Musk
It cleans the mind. Yeah, exactly.
Joe Rogan
I was reading this study about surgeons where they found that surgeons who regularly play video games make less errors.
Elon Musk
Well, video games require manual dexterity. So it makes sense.
Joe Rogan
Completely makes sense.
Elon Musk
Actually. If somebody was ever good at video games, I'd say their surgical skill is going to be very good. Because in order to be good at video games, any kind of fast reaction video games, look at this.
Joe Rogan
32% fewer errors, 24% faster and scored 26% better overall than their non player colleagues.
Elon Musk
Oh, I believe that's incredible.
Joe Rogan
Well, that you should be required in medical school to play video games, don't you think?
Elon Musk
If Somebody's like top, a top ranked video game player and they say they're a surgeon. I'd be like plus one, plus two type of thing.
Joe Rogan
Oh, top rank for sure. This isn't even top ranked. This is just people who play.
Elon Musk
Well, your manual dexterity has to be extremely high. So you're looking at things on the screen, you're reacting and you know, sometimes you got like 10 milliseconds to react. Yes. And so if somebody's got incredible reaction times and manual dexterity, they're obviously going to be a good surgeon.
Joe Rogan
Imagine if there was a course that you could take. That course would promote you would be 26% better. Everyone would have to take that course.
Joe Rogan
Why would you want a surgeon that's less prepared? You would say, hey, Bob, did you take this course? You didn't take this course. Don't you understand? This course makes you 26% better. You'd have to take it. Everyone should have to play video games if you want to be a surgeon.
Elon Musk
Well, I think it certainly would be a very good test to see if somebody can't play video games. Well, that means because you've got to move both hands simultaneously, you've got to react to something very fast on screen and if your keystrokes or your mouse clicks or whatever are wrong, then you lose the game. So if somebody has good rank in video games, I would say that their manual, necessarily, their manual dexterity must be extremely good.
Elon Musk
So the fine motor skills have to be excellent.
Joe Rogan
If you think about, like Starcraft or any, any game like Quake, any game where a lot of people are playing to rise to the top, you have to be exceptional, period, as a human being. Yeah, there's to be something exceptional about you.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Actually Quake, way back in the day, I was one of the world's best Quake players.
Joe Rogan
I know, we talked about this.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, I loved Quake. Yeah, yeah. My final semester in college, I probably put more time into Quake than all my college classes.
Joe Rogan
When I was on news radio. All of the writers were super nerds. They were very, very fun guys. And they had a LAN set up at the studio where they all played Quake. I had never played video games and I would go in with the writers and just kind of hang out with them. We'd get silly and then we'd all start playing video games and playing Quake against each other. And I got addicted, like hardcore. I got a T1 line installed in my house. I went hardcore.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. Checking how many milliseconds of latency oh,
Joe Rogan
yeah, I was, I was fully addicted. I was making my own computers. I was going to Fry's hardware and buying motherboards and putting everything together and, you know, it was too much of a time suck, though. I'm an obsessive person. I can't get involved. Like, I can't play golf.
Elon Musk
No, golf is too slow for me. I mean, a lot of people find golf good. And I mean, I guess if you think of it like it's. I guess if you're saying you're going to walk outdoors with friends and occasionally hit a ball and you're just as an outdoor walk, then that's cool and does require concentration when you're hitting the ball, but it's too slow for me.
Joe Rogan
Nothing compares to video games in terms of the amount of feedback you get, the sensory overload you get when you're looking at a large, high resolution screen. You have a fast computer, you have headphones on, you're hearing sounds from here and sounds behind you and rockets are flying by you. There's nothing like that. But I think golf still is. Like, Jamie will tell you. Jamie's an addict. He's a golf nut. It's super addictive and it takes like eight hours a day.
Elon Musk
Yes. Once you get into golf, I think, I guess any sport, it gets super addictive. So. But for me, the intensity of video games is hard to beat.
Joe Rogan
Yes. And people dismiss it because they think it's just a waste of time. But we're showing like real world benefits of people playing video games.
Joe Rogan
If you want to be a drone operator, it's the only game in town.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Rogan
Really good at video games.
Elon Musk
Yeah, for sure. So in fact, I can actually tell like what my mental acuity is if I just play. If I play a very hard video game. So if I'm trying to sort of get like an extremely good clear time in Diablo or something like that, or a first person shooter, whatever the case may be. If I can tell that I'm tired or my brain's not working as well as it should, it's like a mental calibration. You can tell immediately how good is your mental state.
Elon Musk
And so if you're trying to play really well, if you play late at night and you're tired, you just play badly and you can say, okay. You may think that your brain is working well, but it isn't. You play the video game and you're like, you suck.
Joe Rogan
So, okay, yeah, you're putting it under stress. Yeah. You're really stress testing it.
Elon Musk
You Stress test it and. Cause, like, sometimes, like, oh, I think I'm fine. But then play the game. Like, okay, I'm not. I'm like, 10% below what I should be.
Joe Rogan
That's how I feel about workouts, for sure. Like, that's how I knew I had Covid, or I knew everyone in my family had Covid. And I was trying to not get. Get Covid. And so I was working out. I was like, something's up. I felt fine normally, but then during exercise, I was like, okay, I can tell there's something wrong here, so let's back off, relax. Yeah, yeah. It's like people who don't stress test their mind, they think they're operating on the same level all the time. Like, sometimes I come in here and I can't form a fucking sentence, and I don't know what it is. It's like, what is going on?
Elon Musk
So it's just like, sleep's not. Maybe, like, what, sleep wasn't that good?
Joe Rogan
Or something like that. Yeah, something like that. Or I'm too busy and it's just. It's not. The words aren't coming out. I know how to talk. I talk professionally, and I can't fucking talk. It's like.
Elon Musk
I mean, sleep is massive. I mean, huge. Yeah. So if I can tell immediately did I get a good night's sleep or not? If I just play, like, video game for, like, five minutes, I'm like, okay, my sleep wasn't that good because it's my. You know, and sometimes they don't. Your brain will recover through the day, and it's like, okay, like an hour or two after waking up. It's better.
Elon Musk
Because your brain does kind of recover from bad nights of sleep a little bit during the day.
Joe Rogan
Do you know what really helps creatine, apparently.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Creatine is actually a nootropic, believe it or not. There's a lot of benefits of creatine that are really weird.
Elon Musk
Are there any downsides?
Joe Rogan
No, no. It's a natural part of food. Yeah. Yeah. Especially women. For women, apparently, especially postmenopausal women, it's very beneficial. But there's a lot of, like, cognitive benefits. And one of the big ones that they found recently is performance when sleep deprived. Mental performance when sleep deprived increases pretty measurably when you supplement with creatine.
Elon Musk
Is creatine naturally occurring in, like, steak or doctor?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's like naturally occurring in meat, I think. I think that's where it's coming from. I think it's primarily an animal based thing. Yeah.
Elon Musk
But like I did switch to like steak and eggs for breakfast and I found that's like a power up.
Joe Rogan
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Well we're all overrun with carbohydrates.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Joe Rogan
And you just like carbohydrates make this big crash. The rise and the crash rise and the crash crash. You stay flat. If you eat like a primarily high protein, high fat diet, your body runs off ketosis essentially.
Elon Musk
So I just have like steak and eggs. No bread or anything. Yeah, and it's great actually. It's a power up.
Joe Rogan
I'd say people dismiss this whole carnivore diet thing because in our heads there's a lot of propagandists that put this thing out there that animal agriculture is the number one contributor to global warming.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's rubbish. Bullshit.
Joe Rogan
It's hot bullshit.
Elon Musk
It doesn't matter.
Joe Rogan
Not only is it hot bullshit, but the real problem is factory farming. Regenerative farming is carbon neutral.
Elon Musk
If it doesn't sequester carbon, the animals are not going to make any difference to global warming. None.
Elon Musk
It's worse or nothing.
Joe Rogan
Do you think that that's just propaganda because of people that have a vested interest in like plant based meat products and things along those lines? Green energy?
Elon Musk
I think that's part of it. You know, you're only going to get people pushing to avoid meat. Like some people just, you know, maybe they've got a financial interest, maybe they're just like vegetarians or vegans or whatever. Ideological interests, ideological reasons. But it's not going to make any difference to global warming or you know, the CO2 concentration atmosphere. Really if people eat pure steaks, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. Irrelevant. I want to just be super clear about that.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it will not matter.
Elon Musk
Will not even be able to measure it. Okay. That's how irrelevant it is, isn't it?
Joe Rogan
Funny that that's unmeasurable.
Joe Rogan
That's a heretic. Speaking like that's crazy talk now nowadays it's like you have to say that we have to eat less meat, that meat is bad.
Elon Musk
You can totally eat as much meat as you want. It's not going to make a difference.
Joe Rogan
Sing it, sing it. Tell the world.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely. And if somebody says it does make a difference, I'm like, how will you measure it? And if you can't even measure it, then it's bullshit. Yeah, yeah. Literally I won't be able to measure it.
Joe Rogan
Well, there's so much bullshit out today.
Elon Musk
First of all, yes, Bullshit in all directions.
Joe Rogan
Thank you so much for buying Twitter. Thank you so much. I'm not exaggerating when I think you changed the course of history. I really do. I really think you. You made a fork in the road. We were headed down a path of censorship and of control of narratives that is unprecedented. Forget about what they were able to do back when they had newspapers and the media under control, what they were doing with social media by suppressing information, and when you had a combined government effort, like what they were doing with the laptop story. We have 51 former intelligence agents saying that this is Russian disinformation. Take it offline. And Twitter complied. If you didn't buy that, we wouldn't have known that. We had no idea.
Elon Musk
Exactly. The reason I border is because I'm pretty attuned since I was like, the most interacted with a user on Twitter before the acquisition. So before the acquisitions that add more interactions that then, like, there's some accounts like Obama and whatever had higher follower accounts, but I had the most number of interactions of any account in the system. So I was very attuned to, like, if they saw change, if they change the system, I can tell immediately, like, and I'm like, something weird is going on here. You know, like, yeah, there's like, I just got increasingly uneasy and obviously when they deplatformed the sitting president, you know, deplatformed Trump, that was just insane, you know, and the things he was posting, like, he was posting things that, like, he was posting good things. He was saying like, hey, do not riot. Don't do any destruction of property. You know, please stay calm. That's the kind of stuff he's posting.
Elon Musk
And you're like, what's wrong with that? And then some people said like, oh, that's like some sort of dog whistle. He means the opposite. I'm like, okay, so we'll give you Trump's account now. You post what you think he should post because you can post nothing. You can ask people to calm down. Like, what? It was insane. Like, it didn't make any sense.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's completely illogical when you say it's dog whistling to tell his followers to not be violent. That's crazy.
Joe Rogan
Don't you think they'll listen to him? Yeah, isn't that the whole point? They listened to him and created violence in the first place. That's what you think. That's what you're accusing him of.
Joe Rogan
And then there's the fact that we know that there was agents in the crowd that were agent provocateurs that were encouraging people to do illegal shit. Yes, we know that for a fact. This is not. That was always the big Alex Jones type tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. Because Alex proposed that back at the World Trade Organization protests, I believe we're in Seattle in the 90s, and they sent in agent provocateurs, started smashing things, lighting things on fire. Now all sudden, a peaceful protest is no longer peaceful. They move in, the cops, they shut everything down. They had it set up where it was a no protest zone where you couldn't even have a pin that had the WTO with a red line through it. They wouldn't let you go in through to go to work. So you couldn't protest. You couldn't exercise your First Amendment rights. You couldn't even, like have a peaceful protest. A fucking sticker on your car. You couldn't have that. It's crazy.
Elon Musk
It is crazy. So, no, I think we're very much at a fork in the road, in destiny. And, you know, so, I mean, the reason I did the Twitter acquisition was like, it's like, man, if I don't do this, I think we're screwed is the issue.
Joe Rogan
Well, if you didn't do it, no one else was going to do it because it wasn't a financial winner. It was kind of a crazy move.
Elon Musk
It's a crazy move. I mean, the thing was way overpriced. And, you know, like, long term, I think we can, we can ultimately make it a win for investors, but, boy, this is a hard way to make a living.
Joe Rogan
Well, there's also a concerted effort to suppress it. There's a concerted effort with the advertisers.
Elon Musk
Well, we had. I still have a massive advertiser boycott that was organized by a bunch of left wing NGOs. Like, you know, and you always want. And I should have, I should have brought my. I have a hat make Orwell fiction again.
Joe Rogan
I've seen that hat.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I should have brought. I was gonna wear my. I should have brought my make all fiction hat again. But yeah, I mean, it's just totally, totally nuts.
Joe Rogan
So if you didn't do it, no one would have. And here's the hilarious narrative that I keep hearing from idiots. Elon's a bad businessman. Twitter is worth, you know, 400% less than when he bought it. No, it wasn't worth that in the first place.
Elon Musk
It wasn't worth that in the first place.
Joe Rogan
It wasn't worth $44 billion, you fucking morons. Like wrong. And also you're not taking into account the advertiser boycott.
Joe Rogan
That's total bullshit.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. So there are these organizations, you can tell there's like, they're like when they have an Orwellian name. So like the center for Countering Digital Hate is a total scam organization, you know, because they're like the Ministry of Truth type of thing in Orwell, you know, they're a censorship organization.
Elon Musk
And they organize and they pushed the advertisers to boycott. So we still have like some of the boycott is starting to lift and I think if Trump wins, we'll see, you know, probably most of the boycott left, but if Kamala wins, we'll see that boycott get stronger and they'll freaking shut down. There's no way that the so called public regime would allow X to exist.
Joe Rogan
You really think that they'll be able to shut it down though? Is there a pathway to that?
Joe Rogan
What would they do?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean they can just, they can stick the DOJ on, you know, and say like, you know, they've had this whole thing about like hate speech, misinformation, whatever, except they're the ones pushing the misinformation. But that doesn't stop them from filing massive lawsuits and using the DOJ. I mean like the DOJ has been attacking SpaceX, for example, for not hiring asylum seekers, even though it is legal for SpaceX to hire anyone who is not a permanent resident of the U.S. so we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Just an example of what DOJ can do.
Joe Rogan
So it's illegal to hire someone who's not American American citizen.
Elon Musk
SpaceX is considered an advanced weapons technology, so it's covered by international traffic and arms regulations because we make rocket technology that can be used against the United States. It's like if North Korea or Iran got SpaceX rocket technology, they could use that to launch nukes at America.
Elon Musk
That would be bad.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that'd be really bad.
Elon Musk
That'd be really bad. So since we are in the most extreme category of weapons technology at SpaceX, under US ITAR law, it is illegal for us to hire anyone who's not a permanent resident because the presumption is that if they're not a permanent resident, they are going to return to their home country and take the rocket technology with them. So that's. So it's illegal for us to hire anyone who's not either has not. They can have a green card or be a citizen, they just have to be a permanent resident of the United States. Then there's another law that says if you discriminate against asylum seekers, that's also. You're also breaking the law. So they just. So they. The doj. The DOJ can only do a small number of big lawsuits every year. Launched a giant lawsuit against SpaceX saying that SpaceX discriminated against asylum seekers. And we're like, but we're like, but it's illegal for us to hire anyone who's not a permanent resident. So we're in this. Like, this is what I mean. It's like, oh, well, the Orwell situation is getting insane. Like, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, so you're damned.
Joe Rogan
Can you imagine history looking back up, man, at when you watch the robot arms catch the rocket and you realize, like, this is like one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of aerospace. Like, it is one of the wildest accomplishments. When you watch that thing come and you see all those people cheering and it catches it perfectly. Like, holy shit. Imagine how history is going to look back at the DOJ going after that company.
Joe Rogan
How insane it is.
Elon Musk
Big lawsuit with an army of lawyers. Like, this was not like some minor
Joe Rogan
thing, but it doesn't even make any sense logically. Like, how can it even get brought to court if it's illegal?
Elon Musk
Exactly. So that's what I mean. Like, basically, if the government wants to go after you, they'll just find a reason. It's like that famous quote from Beria, you know, like Stalin's like, chief torturer, the head of Stalin's secret police, and he's like, chief torture, truly evil human being. Like this guy Beria, his. One of his famous quotes was, show me the man and I'll show you the crime.
Elon Musk
They just, they just, they, like, they decide that you're the target and then they figure out the crime afterwards. That's the issue. They decided SpaceX was the target. They just figured out the crime afterwards.
Joe Rogan
Which is so crazy because that's exactly what they're saying Trump is going to do if he gets into office.
Elon Musk
They're doing all the things that they accused Trump of doing.
Elon Musk
Openly, Yeah. I mean, the sheer number of hoaxes that the Democratic Party is pushing over and over again and it's like, look, I understand, like, politicians are going to, you know, exaggerate, they're going to misspeak and they'll tell occasional, you know, untruths, whatever. That's how it is. In politics. But when you have deliberate, concerted, repeated pushing of hoaxes, you're like, wait a second. Like, come on, man. This is too. This is too far.
Joe Rogan
And you're supposed to be the good guys.
Elon Musk
You're supposed to. And you claim to be the good guys. I'm like, exactly.
Joe Rogan
You're supposed to be the progressives.
Elon Musk
Yes. The Dems are like, oh, we're the good guys. We're the honest people. No, no, hang on. You can't claim to be the good guys. You can't claim to be the honest people if you're deliberately post pushing hoaxes that have been debunked thoroughly. Yeah, well, like, even Snopes, which is a liberal thing, says it's bogus.
Elon Musk
Like, the fine people hoax.
Joe Rogan
Obama just said that on stage.
Elon Musk
Obama just said that.
Joe Rogan
I was like, what the flying fuck? He doesn't give a fuck. He doesn't give a fuck. They're just. They're just a goddamn fucking lie. Flat out lie. Flat out fucking lie. How about the other one where Kamala's campaign used what Trump was saying about protecting women from illegal immigrants?
Joe Rogan
You remember that? What he was saying is, whether the women like it or not, I'm gonna do it.
Joe Rogan
When he was saying that, they were trying to say that he was taking away women's right to choose whether women like it or not. Like, that's not what he was saying.
Joe Rogan
He was literally talking about protecting them from dangerous people that are sneaking in through the border.
Elon Musk
Yes, exactly. They'll take, like, not even a full sentence, like a half a sentence from Trump, and then they'll push it on every ad, every speaking event, every day.
Joe Rogan
And it gets repeated on the news.
Joe Rogan
This is what's crazy. They'll talk about it on these new shows. Quote, new shows.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. I mean, a recent one that came up, which had a lot of people, because a lot of people reached out to me was like, they're like, oh, Trump says he wants to execute Liz Cheney. I'm like, that is utter bullshit.
Joe Rogan
It's not what he said at all.
Elon Musk
It's not what he said at all. All he said was like, what he's saying is that, look, if Liz Cheney actually had to fight at the front lines, should think twice about going to war.
Elon Musk
Like, it's easy to. It's easy to go to war. It's easy to be a warmonger if you don't have to, you know, risk dying at the front lines. Like, if other. Like, basically, it's fucked Up. If people are having, like, fancy dinners in Washington, D.C. while people are being slaughtered in trenches, you know, it's like, you're not feeling the pain.
Elon Musk
You're not taking the risk. It's someone else dying that's like. That's cruel and lacking in empathy. And all Trump was saying was that it's like Liz Cheney would be much. Liz Cheney would be much less of a warmonger because she's a huge warmonger, just like her dad, if she actually had to go to the front lines and fight herself.
Joe Rogan
And meanwhile, they're saying that he shouldhe's saying she should be shot.
Elon Musk
Yes. Which is a total lie.
Joe Rogan
But I had, like, tons of people
Elon Musk
call me this weekend saying, oh, Trump says he's gonna put Liz Traney in a firing squad. Like, that is an outrageous lie. And legacy media ran with that lie big time.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. It's crazy. It's just wild to see. And if it wasn't for Twitter or X now, I don't think we would know about all this stuff. I think it would be very difficult for you. I think YouTube throttled. They did something weird. They won't say what they did, but they did something weird with the Trump interview that I did.
Joe Rogan
Where you couldn't find it.
Elon Musk
It doesn't make sense.
Joe Rogan
It made no sense.
Elon Musk
I mean, it was like the biggest interview on earth. Yeah. And you can't find it.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Not only that, it was, like, trending.
Joe Rogan
It wasn't trending.
Joe Rogan
Wasn't trending. You're like.
Elon Musk
Like, there's just no excuse for that, man.
Elon Musk
There's no excuse.
Joe Rogan
Getting a million views. One point was at one point for an hour. At 1.5. 1.5 an hour.
Joe Rogan
And it wasn't trending.
Elon Musk
And it's like. It's like your channel is a known channel. It's not. It's not like it was started yesterday. It's like. Yeah. It's like, this is a high trust. Yours is a high trust channel. It's like you're not trying to sell scam crypto coins.
Joe Rogan
Well, thank God we put it on X as well, because I think just with your account and my account alone, it's like 70 million views.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, it's like you can't hide things anymore because of you. And if it wasn't for you, I think they would have had total control of social media by now. They banned so many accounts during the pandemic, so many dissenting scientists and doctors. Doctors and physicians. They banned so many conspiracy theorists, so many people that colored outside the lines. They would have done that everywhere. And it probably would have. I think even what's going on at Facebook, they're being more lenient. You know, you hear Zuckerberg talking about taking a more libertarian stance. That's entirely reaction to the way Twitter has kind of moved the watermark.
Elon Musk
Exactly. So as soon as any company steps out of line and is willing to actually have the truth debated on their platform, it forces the other platform forms to allow things to be more truthful, to not censor, because their censorship becomes glaringly obvious.
Elon Musk
Yes. And you know, the best thing I found for as a rebuttal, like, if somebody, if there's a hoax is just go to the source material. You know, if you think. If somebody thinks, you know, you know, Trump said that we should put Liz Cheney in a firing squad. I'm like, let me send you a link to X so you can watch his video. That's the best way. Don't take my opinion for it. Don't take anyone's opinion for it. Go to the source material.
Joe Rogan
And Community Notes.
Elon Musk
Yes. And Community Notes is awesome.
Joe Rogan
Community Notes is the best.
Joe Rogan
It's incredible because everybody gets checked.
Elon Musk
Yes. Including me.
Elon Musk
And with Community Notes, all the software is open source and all the data is open source, so you can recreate any given note independently.
Joe Rogan
That's how it should be. That's how it should be.
Elon Musk
Total, absolute transparency in every way. You know, sometimes I get asked like, oh, Elon, can you remove a note? You know, mostly by the left, but sometimes by the right, I'm like, I'm like, I don't even remove. Remove notes on my own account. Nothing. And by the way, everything is totally open. So if I did that, it would stick out like a sore thumb immediately. Like it's not going to be subtle.
Joe Rogan
That is the best counter to misinformation.
Elon Musk
Yes, absolutely.
Joe Rogan
Like, let everybody look at it and say, okay, here's what the actual facts say.
Elon Musk
Yes, exactly. The counter to misinformation is better information.
Joe Rogan
Not just that, but having it checked in real time by the community. So you have millions of people that can go over and debate whether or not this is true or that's true.
Elon Musk
Yes. And like I said, the best way to understand the truth of things is don't take anyone's opinion for it. Look at the source material. Look at what someone actually said. Look at what someone actually did. Look at the real videos of the situation, and then you can actually. You'll know what's real.
Joe Rogan
So as of today, when you were literally on your way here, you sent me this text saying that they're trying to lock you up in jail in Pennsylvania. Tell me what the fuck is happening.
Elon Musk
Well, you know, there's the classic sort of Soros da situation. So we're making a lot of progress in Pennsylvania. So, you know, I've given a whole bunch of talks throughout the state because Pennsylvania's the linchpin in this election. You know, whoever wins Pennsylvania wins the election. So I've been giving. I spent three years in Pennsylvania. I went to college in Philadelphia. So it's not like I'm not a total. I'm not a total stranger to the state. You know, I spent three years there. And we've organized this petition in support of the Constitution, which I think is a good thing, and specifically asking people to. And we wanted this to be like, registered voters in swing states. Like, basically, we want to send a message to the politicians to say that the people care about the Constitution because there have been all these attacks on the Constitution, especially on the Democrat side. They've been repeatedly saying that the First Amendment is an obstacle. And they're claiming, oh, the First Amendment is enabling disinformation, misinformation. And I'm like, yo, there's a reason for the First Amendment, like freedom of speech. The reason the founders of the country put, you know, the freedom of speech there is because they came from countries where if you spoke your mind, you would get shot or imprisoned. That's why the First Amendment exists. And the Second Amendment is there to stop the tyranny of government. The Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, is there to protect freedom of speech. You know. You know, and I've had these debates, especially with people in la, because they're like, want to take everyone's guns away. And I'm like, yo, can you guarantee me that the government, that we will never have a tyrannical government in the United States? Can you make that guarantee? They're like, well, nobody can make that guarantee. I'm like, then we need to keep our guns because that's what's going to stop it.
Joe Rogan
That sounds crazy for people to hear because they think about gun violence and gun problems and gun this and gun that. But that's the reality of the world that we live in, is that tyranny is possible and it exists other places and it's slowly existing. It's slowly rearing its head. In the uk, you're Seeing I think the number of people that have been arrested for just social media posts is bananas. It's in the thousands.
Elon Musk
Yes. Several thousand people have been given prison sentences in the UK for social media posts that. Where there was no explicit link to actual violence, but they just said it encouraged violence. Like. Well, did anyone actually do anything as a result of that media post? Well, no, but they're just. And then they have a prison overcrowding situation in the uk so they quite literally releasing convicted pedophiles and putting people in jail for Facebook posts. There's an actual thing happening in Britain
Joe Rogan
that is so wild, like it's. You're, like it's so wild that people
Elon Musk
can't see, you know, is going on.
Joe Rogan
And what's insane to me.
Elon Musk
Make oral fiction again.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, you know, but it's all being encouraged by the left. Katanji, Brown, Jackson. John Kerry.
Elon Musk
John Kerry was one of the people who said that. He's on camera like a few weeks ago saying that the First Amendment is an obstacle to fighting misinformation.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. That's crazy. That's such a crazy thing to say. When you have a solution in Community Notes, you have a solution in something that could clear everything up, any confusion within a day or two.
Elon Musk
And even without a community Note, you can reply to a post with evidence that shows that the post is wrong. You don't even need community notes. Community Notes is helpful because it sticks to the original note. But in the replies you can say, here's why you're wrong, here are the reasons and here's the evidence.
Joe Rogan
The argument is that people are too unsophisticated, that they're not going to research these things, they're going to be a victim of misinformation. So they're going to read something that's incorrect, they're going to run with it, people are going to die, people are going to. We're going to ruin the world because people believed in misinformation. It's a stupid argument. It's a stupid argument because it's an argument that they're too dumb to know what's right or wrong. If you know because you're saying it's misinformation, why do you think that you're smarter than everybody who reads that?
Elon Musk
Exactly. And obviously anyone on the X system knows that things are posted and then there are replies and there are rebuttals and it's immediately corrected. But where are the corrections for the legacy media? You know, if, you know, some broadcast media, they say false things all the time. But it's a one way street. There's no rebuttal, there's no counter.
Joe Rogan
Right, right. Who's apologized for being incorrect about what? Did Rachel Maddow ever apologize for telling everybody that if you get the COVID vaccine, you're never going to get Covid. It won't. The virus stops with you.
Joe Rogan
Never. No one ever. It's just, it was not true at the time. There was no evidence to support it at the time. It's pure propaganda. And she said it. The Russiagate hoax. For three fucking years. They said that he was Putin's toy and that Putin had him compromised.
Elon Musk
The Steele dossier, Steele dossier was completely fabricated by a lawyer at Perkins Coy who was paid by the Clinton campaign. Literally.
Elon Musk
And still people think the Russian hoax
Joe Rogan
is real and there's no repercussions, there's no one had to apologize. Hillary Clinton never came out and apologized for that and people still listen to her. The whole thing is crazy. And it's all coming from the left, which, growing up as a person who was in the left my whole life, it doesn't make any fucking sense.
Elon Musk
Same, I mean I even, I was on the left until like three years ago. I mean, it's not the left anymore. It's not the left anymore. It's just like I think we obviously want, I mean, I believe like we want freedom. Like we want, we want to maximize personal liberty. I think we want to be kind to people. You know, we want to have empathy and, but it's very important to have personal freedom and a merit based society. And the left wants to oppress your freedoms, especially freedom of speech. And they want to, they want to have a non merit based society, you know, with race based and sex based preferences. And it's like, well, wait a second. No, we just want people to succeed based on their skills and their hard work.
Joe Rogan
And if they don't want people to express themselves about particular issues, then they're not doing the will of the people. And if they're trying to suppress people's ability to communicate, they're only doing that because they want to do things that people don't want them to do. And they want to silence opposition. That's all it is. And the fact that people can't see that and they want to call Trump a fascist. The whole thing is, it's just through the looking glass.
Elon Musk
I mean, it's like one hoax after another that they're perpetrating against Trump. I mean like they try to call the rally at Madison Square Gardens, like a Nazi rally. I'm like, yo, there was like literally an Israeli flag in the audience. I think like a quarter of the speakers were Jewish. Like, there was like, there were people of every race, color, creed, religion at that rally. Like, tell me what about that is Nazi? And yet it was portrayed as a Nazi rally.
Joe Rogan
Well, msnbc, they literally showed video of the Nazi rally from the 1930s and then compared it to the Trump rally, ignoring the fact that fucking Jimmy Carter spoke there.
Elon Musk
There have been dozens of political rallies at Madison Square Gardens. Dozens. On the Democrat side. Like, people on X were like. And here's exactly, here's Jimmy Carter and here's Bill Clinton and here's. Wait a second. Actually, it looks like every presidential candidate has done a. On the Democrat side has done a rally at Madison Square Gardens. Are they Nazis too?
Joe Rogan
But what they're doing is they're preying on low information voters who aren't engaged actively on social media, who don't have the time to look through everything.
Elon Musk
Like people are living. If people are just on looking at legacy mainstream media, then they have a totally different worldview than if they're on X and seeing the actual flow of argument and the actual evidence.
Joe Rogan
Well, what was the pushback like, what happened when you guys released the Twitter files? Because I think the Twitter files is probably one of the most important things in this age of information for understanding the influence that government has on social media and on discourse. Because when we found out that that was the case, that the government was actually asking Twitter to remove posts that were factual all the time, they did the same thing to Facebook. They had them throttle pieces of one of Tucker Carlson's show. They suppressed the views by 50% of factual information.
Elon Musk
Yeah. No, there was massive government interference in Twitter. But like Twitter welcomed it. That's important to old. Twitter welcomed it all. Twitter was controlled by far left activists.
Elon Musk
And they welcomed the government interference. They got paid by the government for it.
Joe Rogan
That's crazy. They got paid for their time, correct?
Elon Musk
Yeah, they got paid millions of dollars for. For suppressing information.
Joe Rogan
So it's like Bill and a bunch of.
Elon Musk
It was like flat out illegal. Like the FBI had this, like this, this sort of magic portal into the Twitter system. And, and, but all of the communication in that sort of. In this portal was auto deleted after two weeks, which breaks federal FOIA laws. So we don't even know what was said because it was all deleted after two weeks.
Joe Rogan
That's insane. Yeah, that's so crazy. It's so crazy. That people thought that was okay.
Elon Musk
It's not super not okay.
Joe Rogan
No, it's super not okay. It's unconstitutional and no one would want that. No one would want the government to have that kind of access.
Joe Rogan
And what was the blowback, like, when all that stuff got released, like, you had to anticipate that there was going to be problems when you released that, like, what was what happened?
Elon Musk
Well, we got a lot of. We did lose a lot of advertising dollars and.
Joe Rogan
Which is crazy because it's essentially like one of the most important forms of journalism is exposing government corruption.
Elon Musk
Yes. I mean, this is the weird thing. It's like the left used to be big on exposing government corruption, but once they control the government, they no longer want to expose the government corruption. Right.
Joe Rogan
They want to pretend that the left wing government's incapable of corruption because we're on the good side.
Elon Musk
I think it may be just like whoever's in power kind of doesn't want the, you know, the other side heard. Because as you pointed out, like, the left, historically, up until, I don't know, maybe even 10 years ago or something like that was the free speech party and now it's the anti free speech party. And they just, they use words like, oh, well, we have to be against hate speech and misinformation, disinformation. But these are propaganda words. You know, it's like, well, who's defining hate speech? Who's defining misinformation? The government. Do you really trust the government to make definition? The whole point of the, of the first amendment is like, do not trust the government.
Joe Rogan
Well, especially when they're wrong. There's no repercussions.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, like with the whole lab leak theory, if you could, you would get kicked off of YouTube if you even presented this argument that, hey, maybe that coronavirus lab where they're doing work on the exact same virus that got released, hey, maybe that's where it came from, since that's where the virus started. What do you think, guys? Yeah, they kick you right off of YouTube.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Yes, exactly. It's like, do you think maybe it could have come from a place called the Novel Coronavirus Research Institute?
Joe Rogan
Like that Jon Stewart bit that he did on Colbert. That was amazing.
Elon Musk
What is this on the door again? Can I see you a business card?
Joe Rogan
And to see Colbert, like, resisting it with every fiber of his, like, what's
Elon Musk
going to happen to us?
Joe Rogan
He was totally blocking the bit to the point where Jon Stewart got off his chair and started walking around trying to take control.
Elon Musk
Yeah, good on John and then the left tried to cancel Jon Stewart, of course. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Meanwhile, he was right. He's right. And no apologies. No apologies. Yeah. And you know, the whole Fauci thing, like any criticism of Fauci, it's like
Elon Musk
anti science demon if you ask me.
Joe Rogan
If you read RFK's book.
Joe Rogan
The real Anthony Fauci, if that's correct, if the facts are in there, that's true. It's all referenced. You could find the sources. And on top of it, he's never been sued for that book, which doesn't make any sense. If he just made a bunch of lies up, he would get sued.
Joe Rogan
So the guy's a monster.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I think so too.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
I think like just looking at the lies that he told, the way he tried to define gain of function research to Rand Paul,
Elon Musk
I think maybe a lot of people out there don't realize Fauci funded the bioweapons research that was going on in Wuhan. He bank shot it off. Like he can't send the money directly to China, so he just bank shot it off. EcoHealth, right? This like fake nonprofit in the US and they sent it to Wuhan and
Joe Rogan
Obama put the skids on that. He stopped that in 2014.
Elon Musk
Yes. I mean, so you know, to give Obama. Throw Obama. Give Obama some credit, he actually was like looking at this and say, hey, this is crazy and we need. And so he actually did stop the like the so called gain of function. Again, a propaganda word. Because what is the function they're talking about? Death. Right. So if you actually use the right word, this is gain of function is death maximization.
Elon Musk
Then you're like, oh, hey guys, should we fund bioweapon research into death maximization? Because that's what gain of function means. Yeah, it means that's the function.
Joe Rogan
Making a disease so that people can get it. Give it to people. And by the way, what's that function again?
Elon Musk
Oh, the function is death. Oh, okay. So just call it a death maximizing
Joe Rogan
virus if you're doing research on that. And the idea behind this research is so that we can cure these things. How come you don't have a fucking cure?
Elon Musk
Start with a cure. Cure first, disease second.
Joe Rogan
It doesn't make any sense. Like you guys had no strategy for dealing with it if it got out. And so you have to like make up this, this new vaccine in like record time. Operation warp speed, release it to the people with very little testing. Fucking crazy.
Joe Rogan
The whole thing's crazy. And went along with it.
Elon Musk
Looney Tunes next level.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's the psyop was fascinating to watch people step in line.
Elon Musk
It's like one of the biggest ops of all time.
Joe Rogan
Of all time. Of all time. And everybody got in line. And when you take it back to when pharmaceutical drug companies were able to advertise on media in the 1990s, that changed everything. We're one of two countries in the whole world that allows this. And because of that, because we don't have socialized medicine, it's a complete profit scam. And they went hard claiming all sorts of things that were never researched. All sorts of things are not supported by data. Like the fact that it would stop transmission, the fact that it would stop infection, the fact that it was safe for pregnant women, the fact that it was safe for children. All of its bullshit.
Joe Rogan
And they pushed it on the whole world. And if you didn't say that at a cocktail party, you were a pariah.
Joe Rogan
And you were an anti vaxxer.
Elon Musk
It was totally psycho.
Joe Rogan
It was like being a holocaust denier. You get kicked out of polite society.
Joe Rogan
Fucking bananas.
Elon Musk
And I should say, like I'm actually generally pro vaccine overall. You know, I think we should look at these things. But I believe in the scientific method. So you never blanket except anything. You never blanket except that any given medication or any given treatment is 100% good. You should always view it with some
Joe Rogan
skepticism, especially when you're getting the data from pharmaceutical drug companies that have like a long history of criminal people who've got a vested interest conduct.
Elon Musk
Yes. They've got a best interest in the research. It's sort of like asking tobacco companies about, you know, whether smoking it's dangerous.
Joe Rogan
You know, exactly the same thing.
Elon Musk
According to our scientists. Everything's fine.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. They lied in court forever. The same thing they did with OxyContin when they said that it wasn't addictive. Like they have a long history of being full of shit if it makes them money. And that's what they do, that's their business.
Elon Musk
They've literally lost multi billion dollar lawsuits in this massive as of
Joe Rogan
amazing scientists. Right. You have these clinical researchers, these people that develop these incredible drugs and they, this is their job. Their job is to figure out some new way to cure something, some new way to stop things. And then you have the money people. And the problem is when you have this one thing that you would assume they're only doing it to help people and then they have this other faction that they're all just numbers People and all they give a fuck about is maximizing profit and making sure they literally have an obligation to their shareholders. You have to make the most amount of money possible. And so they just want to push it on everybody. Regard. Like the Vioxx scandal. There's internal emails showing they knew there was going to be cardiovascular events, people gonna get strokes.
Joe Rogan
And they're like, I think we're still going to do well. And they did. They made like $12 billion. They got fined seven and 50 to 60,000 people died.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. One of them was a friend of mine, got a stroke and died. Yeah, no, he didn't die. He lived. But he was a really healthy guy.
Elon Musk
He was like, not the same afterwards.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Knee problems. Took Vioxx and all of a sudden he was slurring his words and he couldn't concentrate. And people like, I think you're having a fucking stroke. And they took him to the hospital. And then. Then you have this giant class action lawsuit. Then Vioxx gets pulled from the market and they get sued and the whole thing's fucking crazy. But there's a long history of this, I think. What did it? What is the number? Like, one third of the drugs that the FDA approves gets pulled. It's fucking bananas.
Joe Rogan
That's crazy. You're shitty at one third of the things that you say are okay, but yet you're trying to stop MDMA therapy for veterans.
Elon Musk
Yeah. They should let MDMA through. Honestly, that think they'll actually help a lot of people.
Joe Rogan
It would help a lot of people. There's a lot of different therapies, specifically psilocybin, ibogaine. The fact you have to go to Mexico to get ibogaine therapy for veterans. So many guys I've talked to have gone over there and it's like completely giving them a clean slate, refresh their mind and totally new perspective on life. Alleviated depression, cured addictions. Illegal. Yeah, illegal. Oxycontin. Go get it.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And I know some people who, like, their life was ruined by oxycontin. Oh.
Elon Musk
I mean, it really depends on somebody in individual biochemistry. Like, to me, opioids are not addictive to me. I've had them when I've had operations or something and they barely affect my pain level and they make me, like, itchy and uncomfortable.
Joe Rogan
They make me stupid.
Elon Musk
Exactly. But I'm like, so, like, I could never get addicted to alcohol or opioids. It's just not impossible, like, because my biochemistry just does not have. But I love Tasty food. Feel like, you know, if there's. I'm addicted to tasty food, sure. But I have a whole wall of alcohol. It's there for decoration. I haven't done shit.
Joe Rogan
I feel the same way. I could easily quit alcohol. I mean, I'll go weeks without having a drink. It doesn't bother me at all. But I know some people, they have one drink and they're off to the races. And that's the difference in the biochemical differences that we all have. I think that's the case with a lot of addictions. I'm not addicted to gambling, but I get it. I see it. I've seen it in people. But I have this aversion to things that I know are going to ruin my life. I see. That's why I've never tried cocaine. I just saw too many people that it looks too fun. Like, I don't want to get involved.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean. I mean, I think generally, for any given drug, legal or illegal, you could. The question is, can you complete the following sentence blank. Made me a better person. Like, I've never heard anyone say meth made them a better person or cocaine made them a better person. Ever.
Joe Rogan
Made a lot of soldiers better? I think that's.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, if you're doing. If you're like. If your soldiers need to march for three days in a row.
Elon Musk
It's really effective at that, you know? You know, people give, like, France a hard time, but, you know, capitulating in World War II. But you know what's worse than Nazis? Nazis on meth.
Elon Musk
They're not stopping, Norman. They still have, like, six bullets. They're like.
Joe Rogan
They're still coming. That book over there, Blitzed, is all about the use of methamphetamines and the different drugs that they gave their soldiers. The guys at the front of the line that gave the most meth.
Joe Rogan
They have different dosages.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, you just basically think you aren't vulnerable on meth. And so it's one thing, like. So it's one thing we, you know, have, like, the Nazis come after you, but Nazis on meth? You're like, holy shit, those fuckers are
Joe Rogan
not stopping for three days.
Elon Musk
They're not stopping.
Joe Rogan
It's so crazy. Yeah, yeah. That's not a statement. Meth made me a better person. That you hear very often.
Elon Musk
I've never heard that before.
Joe Rogan
No, you hear a lot of, like, psilocybin advocates. You hear a lot of people that talk about psychedelics.
Elon Musk
Exactly. I'VE actually heard many people say that LSD or, you know, mushrooms or MDMA made them a better person. Yeah, many people.
Elon Musk
So that's why I'm like, I think a rule for the FDA should be like, hey, look, if you can complete the sentence legal or legal, that blank made you a better person, actually, then you got a good drug. And if you can't, you got a bad drug.
Joe Rogan
Also, if there's drugs that are available right now that can absolutely ruin people's lives, the rationalization for stopping other drugs that might ruin people's lives, but also can help a lot of people's lives. It doesn't make any sense. It's basically the same thing as censorship. You're taking away people's ability to discern what's true and not true, and you're taking away people's ability to discern what's good for you and not good for you. The way to find that out is to have as much information as possible.
Joe Rogan
So to do research and actually to have unbiased, actual objective observers who are looking at all this stuff that give you real data.
Joe Rogan
And the opposite of that, or the counter is like, if you don't do that, you're empowering cartels.
Joe Rogan
That's the whole reason why they have all that money. It's because it's illegal to sell these drugs in America. The demand is never going away. So instead of like limiting the amount of drugs, now you've got toxic drugs because fentanyl and all this other shit has been because they're not pure. So you're just killing people. You're not saving anybody by protecting them from themselves. But it's a tricky situation because what do you do? Like, if you just like say, okay, now everyone can sell all these people that have been selling boner pills now you can sell methods like, holy shit, you get that.
Elon Musk
You get the double combo and the Viagra. It's the Vigram and meth.
Joe Rogan
Right. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Well, I mean, how many people are already doing that right now with. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of people out there that are essentially on meth.
Joe Rogan
Especially people that abuse Adderall.
Joe Rogan
They're basically amphetamined up all day long. Yeah.
Elon Musk
Adderall is low grade amphetamine.
Elon Musk
So the. I've actually seen people, like, become much worse people if they take too much Adderall. Like, much worse. You know, it's like an agar amplifier. So there. I'm not saying, like, adderall is something like where there are pluses and minuses. It's not a clear cut issue. It does help some people a great deal, but in higher doses, man, that stuff, I've seen people turn into just raging monsters on high doses of Adderall. Just, they're, they're just angry. Like, extremely angry all the time.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they're messed up. Yeah.
Elon Musk
That's what happens if you take myth.
Elon Musk
You turn it like meth turns you into a frigging rage demon.
Joe Rogan
And I'm like, many prescriptions. I'm like, gee, we googled it. Like, one year there was like 39 million prescriptions for Adderall in this country.
Elon Musk
Oh, yeah. And like once in a while there's like an Adderall shortage. And like, there's like, watch Widespread Panic,
Joe Rogan
you know, and then what do people do? And then it's the same thing as, like, when they tried to, like, limit the amount of oxycontin. Well, people go to street heroin. And if you're addicted to Adderall and your dealer, your guy who sells you weed, it's like, hey, man, I can get you like, like low grade meth. Like the stuff the Nazis took.
Elon Musk
Well, they had high grade meth. Actually, that pharmaceutical grade it was. They had epic meth. It was like, made by like, like pharmaceutical grade meth is going to be if, like, excuse me, look at the freaking online Wikipedia page. But there's like many different versions of meth. Like, not all the same and they have different effects, but like, pharmaceutical grade, pure meth. You are going to be, oh, my God, super productive. Super productive for a certain period of time. And you're not going to sleep for a while. And then you will have some anger management issues. So like, they actually, the Nazis, they did actually roll back how much meth they were using because they had quite a few incidents of the soldiers killing their officers because they were on too much meth.
Elon Musk
Yeah, too many officer got fragged by the, you know, their platoon that was on too much meth because they, that happened quite a few times. Like, you just. When someone's on a lot of meth, they're, they're, they're, they're very, they can get very angry.
Joe Rogan
Did you ever pay attention to when John McAfee was cooking meth in a lab in his backyard?
Elon Musk
I mean, McAfee's quite a character.
Joe Rogan
He was a character character. We had him on the podcast when he was on the run. So he called in from an undisclosed location when he was running from. Where was he? Costa Rica? Is that where he was? Belize. Belize, right. So when he was running from the authorities, he called in. We had him on the podcast on the run. And I was asking him about these posts, like, because there was an online account that was linked to him where he had this very detailed laboratory, like, super sophisticated, the best meth. Like a super genius cooking meth.
Elon Musk
I mean, I think he, like, he had this lab, like, he was making, like, a wide range of drugs. And there's, like, I talked to actually, like, a reporter who went down and, like, interviewed him in Belize and Portugal. Man, that's one of the scariest things. He's, like. He was. He was quite terrified. So one of the things that McCaffrey, he had, I guess, this trick where he would play Russian roulette with himself. So he'd put a bullet in the revolver and then spin the chamber. And clearly he had, like, some, like, trick to, you know, know that it was not. There's some, you know, way that he knows it's not the right bullet. But I do Wonder, like, if McAfee is high and he does that, he's not always going to get the trick right, you know.
Joe Rogan
You sure he had a trick or maybe.
Elon Musk
Yes. So according to this reporter, when he went to visit McAfee in Belize, McAfee took out the revolver, put a bullet in the revolver, spun the chamber, and then pointed at his head and went click. And the reporter's, like, saying, please don't do this. Like, this is insane. Click, click, click. And then pointed the gun at the ground, and Nick went click, bang. And shot a bullet in the ground.
Elon Musk
That's a hell of a party trick.
Elon Musk
This is the next level potty trick.
Joe Rogan
That's the guy who's seen the Deer Hunter too many times.
Joe Rogan
Remember that scene when they were forcing.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. That's a heavy scene.
Elon Musk
That's a heavy scene.
Joe Rogan
De Niro and Christopher Walken. That's one of the greatest scenes in any movie ever. I remember watching that scene just, like, clawing at my pants. McAfee was a wild boy.
Joe Rogan
And, you know, created brilliant antivirus software.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. He may have made some of the viruses, too.
Joe Rogan
You think so? Well, didn't he, like, give laptops to a bunch of government organizations with viruses on them? Yeah. So that he could. What they were doing.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
I. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody whacked that guy. I don't know what happened to him, but I. He would be a guy that would Be like, this guy is a little
Elon Musk
bit too loose and probably had sensitive information. I don't know for sure he did. I mean, I found out to be an interesting guy. I mean, like, I'm generally like, feel like if somebody is not harming someone else, they should be okay. Now there is some suggestion that McAfee, like, killed his neighbor in Belize. Yeah, he probably did.
Joe Rogan
Maybe the neighbor was a douchebag.
Elon Musk
I think he probably did.
Joe Rogan
Seems like he probably did. Seems like the neighbor killed his dog.
Joe Rogan
Right. And then it seems like he killed the neighbor. Yeah, Allegedly.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, it seems likely.
Joe Rogan
It's not a zero possibility.
Elon Musk
It's not. Definitely not zero. Seems more likely than not.
Joe Rogan
He's a messed up wild man playing Russian roulette. Hey, maybe you kill your fucking neighbor.
Joe Rogan
I mean, if somebody killed your dog, you'd be really inclined to kill them, too.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Somebody killed your squirrel, John Wick?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. The fucking squirrel thing is bananas. Yeah, that squirrel thing in New York.
Elon Musk
So here's the thing about the whole squirrel thing, is that how can it be that we live in America, supposedly land of the free and the. You know, the government can barge into your home with guns, so if you resist, you're going to get shot and then take your pets and execute them. And if they can do that to your pets, what do you think they can do to you?
Joe Rogan
It's not an exaggeration.
Joe Rogan
It sounds like you're. Oh, that's so crazy. How can you make that connection? But it's. That's. Why would you kill that cute little squirrel that was obviously a pet and trained from the time it was a baby? If you see the interaction that guy has with that squirrel, it was wonderful. It was really cute.
Elon Musk
Yes, absolutely. It was just obviously it was a beloved pet squirrel and a raccoon, too, and doing no harm. And the government comes in, barges into the guy's house, takes his pets and kills them. And, you know, I think this should. This should really get people out there mobilized, frankly, because, you know, we think you said that like the John Wick movie where John Wick's like, you know, he wants to. He just wants peace. Like, you know, in the John Wick movie, he just wants to. He's like, listen, I want to retire. And they offer him, like, tons of money. Like, because they want him to be an assassin, to keep being an assassin. Like, they're like, they, like, offer him tons of money. They threaten him. He's like, listen, I'm not gonna be. I'm out. You know, and they kill his dog. That was a bad idea. That was a really cute little puppy.
Joe Rogan
And the puppy was his ex wife's gift to him when she died of cancer.
Joe Rogan
Best revenge movie of all time. Because it's so ridiculous. He kills everybody.
Elon Musk
It kills everyone.
Joe Rogan
And you're rooting for him.
Elon Musk
Yeah, they shouldn't have killed his dog.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they fucked up and they shouldn't have killed that squirrel.
Elon Musk
They shouldn't kill that fucking. That squirrel. I mean, it's like how many, how many cases have we not heard about, you know,
Joe Rogan
little guy. That squirrel clearly had a love relationship with that guy. He would hop all over him and climb on him. I mean, it was. That was his pet. That squirrel thought of that man as his protector, as his, his companion. Yes. There was nothing wrong with that. And in Texas, it's totally legal. You could have a fucking zebra out here you can have whatever you want. And that's the argument for freedom. And you know, the flip side is you get a bunch of people with tigers in their backyard, which is not great.
Elon Musk
It's like this was a fucking squirrel. It's not, it's not an anaconda or, you know, you know, crocodile or something that's.
Joe Rogan
Or a chimpanzee. Did you see Chimp Crazy?
Elon Musk
A man? Chimps. Chimps. Chimps will eat your face.
Joe Rogan
They will you up. They don't even. The thing is, they don't even kill you. They just cripple you. Chimps don't even kill people.
Joe Rogan
Which is really weird. They just bite your hands off and bite your dick off and tear your face apart.
Joe Rogan
They want to leave you. They could kill you easily. If a chimp want to just punch you in the head until you're dead, it wouldn't take long. But they don't kill you. They just rip you apart.
Joe Rogan
And you can have a chimpanzee. Well, you used to be able to have a chimp in a lot of states, and then Chimp Crazy kind of exposed a lot of that. And PETA did a great job of stopping people from keeping chimps as pets because once they hit like five, you can't control them anymore.
Elon Musk
Well, it's obviously totally understandable if somebody's got a creature that is dangerous to others, but obviously a squirrel and a raccoon are not.
Joe Rogan
Well, squirrels are fucking everywhere. That's what's so crazy. Why can't you have it in the house? What kind of rules are we dealing with? You have rats everywhere.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, they're allowing criminals to go free and, like, violent criminals to go free, but they're like, spending your tax dollars to come in and execute your fucking pets. What the hell is going on?
Joe Rogan
But it's overreach.
Elon Musk
It's government overreach. And this just keeps getting worse every year. And that's why we've got to. We've got to fight back against this. And, you know, people say, like, well, it's just a squirrel. Well, it was, you know, in John Wick's case, it was just a dog, right?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. You know, well, remember the Russian guy said, it's a fucking dog. It's just a fucking dog.
Elon Musk
Just a fucking squirrel.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, it's. The funniest thing is when I just don't understand how anybody could justify it. I don't understand how anybody. Like, it seems to me that in a logical world, all that guy would have to do is say, why don't you see me with this squirrel? This squirrel's a pet?
Joe Rogan
Like, look, he hops on me. He eats, he sleeps. I can keep a gerbil, but I can't keep a squirrel. I can have a guinea pig. I can't have a squirrel. I can have a chinchilla. My daughter has a chinchilla. It's adorable. Adorable little thing. Climbs all over. Can't have a squirrel.
Elon Musk
Even if they. If they did take a squirrel away, couldn't they have released it into the woods or something?
Joe Rogan
Well, it's a bit. The idea is you have to euthanize it because it's used to being fed. It doesn't know how to forage. It won't be able to, like, find a home. Brutal. Squirrels are absolutely brutal to each other. They throw each other out of trees, which is one of the reasons why squirrels can fall from, like, 30ft and just kind of bounce off the ground and live. It's like. It's a natural adaptation because squirrels, during mating, they bite each other. There used to be, like, a rumor there was a myth that squirrels bite each other's nuts off. That seems to be a myth, but it came out of the fact that squirrels are so ruthless during mating. So one female is just running away. I have squirrels in my backyard. I watch it all the time. One female apparently goes into estrus, and all the male squirrels fight to get to her. So they're running up trees and chasing each other around trees, Literally throwing each other off trees to try to, like. So if this poor little peanut, the squirrel who's used to living with a guy in an apartment like it's out there in the wild world.
Elon Musk
Well, fair enough, but at least they have a chance.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, at least he has a chance.
Elon Musk
At least have a chance.
Joe Rogan
How about just leave him with the guy?
Elon Musk
Yeah, leave him with the guy for sure.
Joe Rogan
What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you killing that squirrel? It doesn't make any sense.
Elon Musk
Yeah, and then to add insult to injury, there were a bunch of people on the left who were like, actually posting that they're glad that MAGA squirrel got killed, which is fucking MAGA squirrel.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, the fucking squirrel has an ideology. It's a cute flee squirrel.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's a nice symbol because most reasonable, compassionate people think that's terrible. And most people who have pets think it's terrible.
Elon Musk
Terrible. So, I don't know. I mean, I'm like, I hope people just go out there and vote for Peanut man, if nothing else. If nothing else, just vote. Why don't you vote for Peanut?
Joe Rogan
They've done such a job of painting Trump as a monster. They've taken the worst things that he's ever said, and he's not a perfect person. But guess what? No one's a perfect person. They don't exist. This purity test, like, if Obama was a perfect person, he wouldn't be lying on stage about, you know, very fine people hoax.
Joe Rogan
No one's going to be a perfect person. But the thing that they didn't understand about Trump is he's so crazy that if you tell him, like, he can't be president. Like, remember, Obama did that during that White House press correspondence. There's one thing that I'm. That I am. That you'll never be President of the United States. You see Trump in the audience going, okay, motherfucker.
Elon Musk
The funny thing is, I was actually at that White House correspondent's dinner where, you know, it's supposed to be a roast of the president, right? Trump's there.
Elon Musk
He's actually supporting. You know, basically, if you go to the White House correspondence dinner, you're there in support, actually, of the president and support of the press, Right? And it's meant to be that you're roasting the president. Like, Trump's just there. He's like. Actually, you know, just. He's, like, there as part of the support. And then they turned it around and just started roasting Trump. And he's just sitting there. I'm like. He's like, yo, I just came to the dinner. I wasn't. I'm just Here to support.
Joe Rogan
You know, we know what it was because of. Right, the birther stuff.
Joe Rogan
That's what it all was. It was all. Trump was at the head of a lot of these people spreading this rumor online that Obama's birth certificate was forged and he's actually from Kenya. And what's weird is if you go back to Obama's early days, there are some things that say he's from Kenya. Like I think in his, something from college said he was from Kenya. But, you know, that could just be. You know, people print things wrong all the time. It doesn't mean he's actually from Kenya. But Trump was one of those guys that was like spreading that supposedly false rumor.
Elon Musk
Was he pushing it hard? I'm not. Yeah, this is the kind of thing where I want to just go and look at saying what. What did he actually say?
Joe Rogan
No, he definitely was. He's definitely saying, you know, look, he. I don't think he has the time to go into things like, very deeply.
Joe Rogan
And so I think he could probably be influenced by a bunch of people like these Marjorie Taylor Greene type people come to him with some wild ass theory. Sure, he might be. And I think there's a lot of that stuff that gets fed to people on purpose so that they'll say incorrect things so that they're easy to dismiss. And I think there's also a lot of people that just make shit up and, you know, they tell you the earth is flat and then a bunch of people watch a YouTube video and they believe it. Yeah, well, but on that White House
Elon Musk
correspondent I was there. And the degree to which they attacked Trump in that, at that White House center was really, it was so over the top. It was like making everyone uncomfortable. Really. It was really over the top. You know, I mean, I think like sort of a passing joke of like, you know, a few passing jokes are fine, but they twisted the knife big on Trump in that. And you could see Trump just getting like angrier and angrier and more and more upset.
Elon Musk
And it's like, man, this is not good karma. You know, that's what I was thinking at the time. Look under glass, two tables away from Trump, and I'm looking at him like, man, this is too much, you know?
Joe Rogan
Well, it's kind of crazy what they made out of that, because that's the kind of guy that if you tell him he can't do something, he's going to just keep trying.
Elon Musk
It was a big mistake to rag on him so much at that White House Correspondence Center.
Joe Rogan
Well, just look at the way they've attacked him. Just using the legal system. Like this thing in New York where the 34 different felony counts, they were essentially misdemeanors, that there are bookkeeping errors, that they decided, even though it passed the statute of limitations, they decided to try him for these. It didn't identify a felony.
Elon Musk
Abuse of the law is what's going on.
Joe Rogan
But most people would have quit, most people, after the Eugene Carroll lawsuit and this lawsuit and all the other ones that. The insurrection thing, the Georgia thing, all these different things getting kicked off of Twitter, most people would have just like, this is too much. I can't take this. But he's so fucking crazy. He's like, all right, come on, we're going to war. And he just digs his fucking heels and keeps going. Yeah, it's the wrong guy to do that, to just like attacking him at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Most people have been humiliated. He got angry and he's like, yeah, all right. You say I can't be president. I've been thinking about running for about 15 fucking years. Finally, I'm going to run.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, that was a real bad move. But, yeah, I mean, I can certainly understand, like, making some jokes about like, you know, a few sort of passing jokes on Trump. But, man, I was there at that dinner and they ragged on Trump so much. It was insane.
Joe Rogan
The reason why I would push back on that, cuz I would say there's a bunch of different speakers, right? And Trump would obviously be a target. And if they all attacked him, it's because he's like, if you're going to make fun of people in the audience, and especially in the zeitgeist, that whole birther thing was big. And most people were dismissing it as being a ridiculous conspiracy theory. So who the fuck is this guy saying this? And so you have eight to 10 individual speakers that are writing monologues. Of course they're all going to hit Trump. Yeah.
Elon Musk
Well, anyway, obviously it was a mistake. They shouldn't have done that. But I invite people to watch that. The original source material. And I think a few jokes are fine. You know, it's like. But. But it's like he shouldn't be the. Like, it felt like he was the primary object of the roast.
Elon Musk
Which is that's. That's not the whole point of the thing is it's a roast of the President, not roast the audience.
Joe Rogan
The thing about it is, like, he's easy to roast. And then on top of that Obama was like loved and cherished by the left and most of those people are on the left. There's only so far you can push, you know, you can't ask him about a chef. You know, there's like, what happened with the chef, bro? You can't, it's like certain things you can't bring up.
Elon Musk
You wanna, what's your favorite sport? Paddleboarding.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Wasn't that guy a really good swimmer?
Joe Rogan
Tell me what happened.
Joe Rogan
You can't bring that up. Like if you're gonna roast Hillary, you can't bring up the death count.
Elon Musk
Like Hillary, what's the best way to stay in touch? Email.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's. If you're doing one of those.
Elon Musk
Destroyed the servers and poured like bleach on the, like computers.
Joe Rogan
She poured bleach on them.
Elon Musk
That's what I thought. Yeah, that's what I believe. It wasn't just like they took a hammer to it. They like destroyed like there was no possible way to actually get forensics on the thing.
Joe Rogan
What was in there?
Elon Musk
That's right. I mean, what was in there?
Joe Rogan
What was in there?
Elon Musk
Why would they care so much?
Joe Rogan
That's so crazy.
Elon Musk
Yeah. The whole thing is there was no, there was no legal action against that, which was clear destruction of evidence.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's also, there's this other narrative that always drives me crazy, is that he's going to destroy democracy. So in order to destroy democracy, we have to install a president without a primary. We have to have a candidate that is the least liked vice president of all time, the least popular vice president of all time, and then use gaslighting and the full force of the media machine to turn her into the future and hope. And then we're going to. She's going to be changed even though she's a sitting vice president. And then on top of that, this idea of change when the Democrats have been in control for what, 12 or 16 years, which is crazy. Like, this is the change.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, obviously I view this election as a turning point, like a fork in the road of destiny that is incredibly important. You know, I've not been politically active until this election and the reason I've been politically active this election is because I think if we don't, if we don't like Trump, I think we will lose, we will lose democracy in this country. We will lose the two party system. And let me explain why. So there's only like six or seven swing states. The margin of victory in those states is small, often like 10 or 20,000 votes. What the Democrat administration has been doing is importing vast numbers of illegals into swing states. You can look at the numbers on the actual government website, meaning you don't take my word for it, you'll just look at the numbers as reported by the government, which is controlled by the Democrats. And what we're seeing is triple digit increases in the number of legals in every swing State, some cases 700% increases. These are gigantic numbers. So if you have a state that went, that has a 10 or 20,000 vote margin and you put 200,000 illegals into that state, you 10x the, you swamp the. It's not a swing state anymore, it's going to vote blue. And then once the swing states vote blue, there is no election anymore. There's only a Democrat primary, which is so crazy.
Joe Rogan
And it's so crazy that people are fine with that.
Elon Musk
Well, I guess people on the left will be fine with that because they think that's a good idea.
Joe Rogan
They just want to win. They just want to win.
Elon Musk
Correct. The thing is, one does not need actually any grand conspiracy theory for this. You just have to look at the simple matter of incentives. If the Democrat party wants to basically achieve permanent victory, all they need to do is turn the swing states, turn the swing states blue, they have permanent victory and then we're a one party state. And then they will keep doing that, obviously. They will keep stacking the deck by bringing in vast numbers of illegals into the swing states, keep stacking it so that the next election, each successive election will be worse than the last one. And that's what's happening. And if you want to see like, well, is this actually going to happen? Look at California. California is Super Majority Dem, 70% Dem. A month ago they passed a law making it illegal to show ID in any election in California. So a friend of mine went to vote in Palo Alto because he was like, is this for real? He tried to show his ID and they reacted like, if you show a cross to a vampire, they're like, no,
Joe Rogan
we can't even look at that id.
Elon Musk
It is illegal for them to even look at your ID if you want to present it in California.
Elon Musk
For any election at all, even like
Joe Rogan
city council, what logical reason other than to cheat would you ever have that law? The reason is to cheat only like you can never make an argument any other way. And I think 84% of people polled believe that you should show ID to vote. So it's against the will of the people.
Elon Musk
Yes. And we are extremely rare. We're an outlier in not requiring id. Basically, almost every country on earth requires ID to vote. So as soon as you make you ban ID for voting, it makes fraud impossible to prove, because how do you trace the fraud?
Joe Rogan
Right. Yeah. It's insane.
Elon Musk
And what I'm saying is that how is it legal? What I'm saying is, like, this election is the last chance to preserve democracy in America. Mark my words. Everything they accuse Trump of, they are guilty of. And if Trump doesn't win, this will be the last real election in America, and we will. If the Kamala. If the big government Kamala puppet machine wins, they will legalize the illegals in the swing states. There will be no swing states. Every election going forward will be a guaranteed Democrat win, and it will actually be worse than California. The reason it will be worse than California is because the one thing that keeps California from being super crazy is, is that you can move out of California like you and I did. You and I used to be in California, but we moved to Texas. We're still in America. But if the Dems won this election, they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states, and everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape.
Joe Rogan
That is so insane.
Elon Musk
This is the final. This is it. This is the last chance.
Joe Rogan
Has anybody tried to push, and I
Elon Musk
just want to, like, go out and vote. Vote like your life depends on it. Vote like your future depends on it. Because it does. This is the last chance, man.
Joe Rogan
Is there any argument against this? Has anybody tried to debate this? Has anybody tried to say that this is nonsense, this is a conspiracy? Has anybody made any sort of a rational argument?
Elon Musk
The left actually, interestingly, does not want to pick up much on this argument because it's because the more attention, the more you look at it, the more obviously it is true. Because you just say, like, well, are the numbers correct? Are there really this many illegals that have been imported into swing states? Yes. They haven't just walked across the border. They've been flown in. Flown in? In airplanes?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Using a shipping app.
Elon Musk
Yes. Yeah, they made an app.
Joe Rogan
Well, the app always existed, but it used to be for people coming over here, like, shipping with goods so they could track you while you're in America so you could legally be here. They know where you are. And then they changed it to allow that app to schedule illegal aliens to come across the border.
Joe Rogan
Asylum seekers. Come on in.
Joe Rogan
Oh, you have an apply people in.
Elon Musk
They're literally being flown in to the swing States. And so the reason that I think left doesn't want to push back on this is because the more attention that this gets, the more people realize it is true.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it is true.
Elon Musk
That's why they're just pretending that they're pretending. I'm not saying anything, but I'm like, yo, they're literally flying vast numbers of illegals who are then beholden to the Democrats. And sometimes they gather a bottle of people say like, well, you know, these illegals are. They don't have the same social values as the Democrat Party because they're like more socially conservative. I'm like, yeah, but that's not the point. If you look at the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that their primary thing is staying in the country and getting their friends and family in. And then the Democrats give them all these benefits, like tons of benefits. More benefits than if you. Than citizens, literally.
Elon Musk
So they're beholden to the Democrats for all these benefits. They want to get their friends and family in which the Democrats support and the Republicans don't. So they vote them. And you can look empirically at California and say like, did they vote Republican or Democrat in California? Oh, they voted Democrat big time.
Joe Rogan
Well, Reagan gave them amnesty in the 1980s and that changed the state, basically. Except for Arnold changed the state entirely. Blue.
Joe Rogan
And Arnold was an exception because he was like a socially liberal, famous guy.
Joe Rogan
And you know, didn't really impose any radical restrictions on any of the people that were gonna vote Democrat in the first place. The whole thing is just. It's bizarre to watch play out, cuz it just seems like there's no. This can't be actually what's happening. Did you see my conversation with Fetterman about it? Yeah, he was completely in denial about it. I don't think there's that level of organization.
Elon Musk
I'm like, what are you talking about exactly? Just like. Because you can, you can break it down. So like, are any of these numbers wrong? Because we got these numbers from Homeland. Homelandsecuritygovernment.gov. okay, right. So we got it from the.gov website. Has the government reported these numbers incorrectly? No, they have not. Those numbers, if anything, are low. So, okay, so they have in fact flown vast numbers of illegals to swing states.
Elon Musk
Bypassing the border entirely. And so that is factually true. Then you can say like, well, what is their probable voting pattern? Oh, okay. Overwhelmingly Democrat into swing states. And. Oh, and then. Well, but do the Democrats actually want to fast track them for citizenship? Oh yes, they do you can see Chuck Schumer on TV saying at a rally this year was saying he wants to fast track and make all 11 million or however many, I believe his quote was, citizens as soon as possible. The goal is they are fast tracking citizenship as quickly as possible. So whether one thinks it's cheating or not, it won't matter because they will be fully able to vote. And for people on the left, this is actually happening. I invite people to rebut this and show me where I am wrong. Please do so.
Elon Musk
They can't. They can't because it's true.
Joe Rogan
Well, what's scary to me is that there's people that are on the left, like people that were Bernie Sanders supporters.
Elon Musk
For example, Bernie got screwed with, like, talk about undermining democracy. Bernie should have won the nomination and they stole it from him and gave it to Hillary.
Joe Rogan
Exactly, Exactly. That's what I was going to bring up. Like, they control the primary process.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. So if you've got a. If you have a Democratic primary, it's not Democratic. We just saw that. We saw it with Bernie. We saw it with Kamala. Like a week before Biden was summarily fired, he was posting that he's in it for the long term. He's going, yeah, yeah, he's. He's not giving up. Next thing you know, Sunday afternoon, the posting on X is that. That he's resigned from the race, which is. And his staff didn't even know. Like, they're reading it on the X platform. That. That. Okay. That's how they learned about it.
Joe Rogan
What do you think happened there? How do they do that?
Elon Musk
They. I mean, because they clearly just not. Not in charge.
Joe Rogan
They could have used the 25th amendment, fake president, but they would have had to admit that there was a certain period of time where they knew that he was mentally compromised.
Joe Rogan
And so they made this decision to not do that.
Elon Musk
Well, the weird thing is that the president's supposed to be the boss.
Elon Musk
And yet he's obviously not the boss.
Joe Rogan
Right. So who's running the country if she's busy campaigning? She's so busy she can't do anything except Saturday Night Live. She did that. She's so busy, she's constantly campaigning. How could you be paying attention to international relations? How could you be paying attention to the economy? How could you be paying attention to any of those things? How do you have the time? You can't.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, Biden being the president's supposed to be the CEO, the chief guy he was commander in chief, but it just obviously that Biden was not. He was just a puppet. And when the various puppet masses decided that the puppet had, you know, was no longer useful, they just tossed out the. Tossed out the puppet and then got a new puppet with Kamala. I mean, Kamala can't even talk. You invited her on your show. I think the most damage that could possibly be done to a campaign is going in your show and seeing what she says in hours two and three.
Joe Rogan
Two and three is when things get spikes.
Elon Musk
And I'm like, oh, my God, you
Joe Rogan
can hide for 20 minutes. You can hide for 20 minutes.
Elon Musk
I mean, you could just regurgitate talking points for, you know, half an hour, maybe an hour. Just where she's just saying, like, non sequiturs. But eventually she just runs out of even. She runs out of non sequitur.
Joe Rogan
Well, they wanted to limit it to an hour.
Elon Musk
Exactly. That's right.
Joe Rogan
But I was thinking of doing it initially, before Trump came here. First of all, when they found out that there was a rumor. I never announced that Trump was coming. What I was going to do is just release it in my. The way I like to do things. I don't like to tell anybody who's coming on. It'll get big no matter what. If Trump was on, it would have been huge. I'm like, just put it out there. People go crazy. Yeah, but he apparently. Or someone from his organ, some loose lips, and then it got out. And so she contacted my management company, and they. Her organization, her campaign camp contacted us and said, would Joe have her on? I said, yes. And they said, she wants you to fly to where she is, and she's only willing to do 45 minutes.
Elon Musk
Only 40. I mean, that's.
Joe Rogan
And I was like, oh, no. So I thought about doing. I'm like, maybe. Maybe I can get a sense. Maybe I could convince her. Maybe I could coax her into doing more time. I just wanted to talk to her. Yeah, I don't give a fuck what we talk about. We talk about recipes.
Elon Musk
I don't give a shit. Exactly.
Joe Rogan
Just talk to me.
Elon Musk
Just the things, like, you just can't. Like, you can't just output bullshit not sequiturs for three hours.
Elon Musk
So. But 45 minutes you could do.
Joe Rogan
I thought maybe for 45 minutes I could get something out of it. But then when Trump came and did the three hours, I was like, you know what? It has to be like this. This is the only way to be fair.
Elon Musk
It's got to be like, three hours.
Joe Rogan
And it should be in this room.
Joe Rogan
Because this room is, like, a history of people.
Elon Musk
This room has good vibes, actually. Yeah, it's got good vibes on the stream, actually.
Joe Rogan
I subscribe to the idea that places have memory. I think there's something real to that.
Elon Musk
That's why it does feel that way, actually.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I'm sure if you go to Diddy's house. Probably feels really weird. We're walking around that house. Probably like, what the fuck happened here? Yeah, I bet there's some memories in that house, you know?
Elon Musk
Sounds rough, man.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's just amazing how many people in the Diddy party list that are supporting Kamala.
Elon Musk
Yeah, Seriously.
Joe Rogan
It's, like, openly, like, all in.
Elon Musk
Yes. It's like JLo, like, was. Was like, his ex girlfriend, and it's, like, now deciding she's, like, warning people against Trump. I'm like, well, wait a second. So how many people did she warn against Diddy?
Elon Musk
Oh, zero. Okay, well, maybe we shouldn't trust her opinion.
Joe Rogan
Did you see the Babylon Bees take on it?
Elon Musk
Did you see the Babylon B is
Joe Rogan
awesome, but oh, my God, they're so on fire because the left can't say anything. Well, the Onion has been crippled.
Elon Musk
Well, the problem is that, like, find that pose. The woke ideology makes, like, humor illegal.
Elon Musk
So when, like, there's so many. No, like, humor. No fly zones.
Elon Musk
You can't make fun of anything. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Babylon B had a thing about Kamala Harris. Diddy's ex girlfriend urges Americans to trust her judgment. Yeah. By the way, you get to see how bad an actress she is too.
Elon Musk
But I mean, like, if she's gonna be warning people, why does she never warn anyone about Diddy?
Joe Rogan
It's. The whole thing is so strange to watch play out. It seems like the Diddy thing was like an Epstein type compromise deal where he had. Whether he was doing it himself. Conceivably, people want to think that he's attached to some intelligence agency or something like that. I think he's a gangster who made a billion dollars and knew how to control people by compromising them. That's what I think. Whether or not he was, he had help. I don't know whether or not he shared some of that information with people so they knew they had compromising stuff on people. I don't know. But clearly he was doing it for his own jollies too. There was something sick about it.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, the thing is that people in the music entertainment industry had to know that. That he was like abusing, you know, kids basically. And yet they still fed him kids. Where's the accountability?
Joe Rogan
There had to be rumors. There had to be. There had to be.
Elon Musk
They had to know. Yeah, they had to know.
Joe Rogan
Katt Williams is talking about it on.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, on that podcast.
Elon Musk
But like who's, it's like who's feeding him? The kids, you know.
Joe Rogan
Right, yeah. And what, what videos do, do they have of these people where they're willing to defend him and they're willing to keep, keep quiet about all this. Like how much, how much, how many people were compromised? Yeah, the whole thing is fucking crazy.
Joe Rogan
It's just crazy when you, you know, because the nutty conspiracy theories is like, oh, there's a bunch of pedophiles in Hollywood and you're like, come on, that sounds too kooky. And then you read, you see like the Nickelodeon thing and all these different, you're like, what the fuck? How much of this is real?
Elon Musk
There's a lot more real than I think people realize. Yeah. I mean part of it is like, like you said, like where you know, if someone's like a pedophile, they're going to go for a target rich environment.
Joe Rogan
Right. Obviously, like that Jimmy Saville guy from
Elon Musk
the uk, that guy was some next level. That was next level. And the BBC try to hide that. What? That that guy was one of the worst like, like basically child rapists of all time.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And looked like one.
Elon Musk
He looked like one.
Elon Musk
If you had a poster of like.
Elon Musk
Does this guy look like the creepiest fucking looking guy? Evil child rapist that Harm said made
Joe Rogan
it to the grave like.
Joe Rogan
Got away with it. Got away with it till he died. They hid it from people until he died.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, there's. That stuff's real and no one wants to believe that stuff's real. Like here's a, here's a statistic that people need to take into consideration. When you think about illegal immigration, do you mean kids are missing?
Elon Musk
Like missing kids that came across the
Joe Rogan
border that are unaccountable?
Elon Musk
I mean I saw a number on like 300,000 or something like that.
Joe Rogan
Something crazy like that. Let's say it's only 10% of that. That's still insane. Yeah, that's insane. There's thousands and tens of thousands of kids that have been trafficked potentially. I mean, when you know that like sex trafficking and child trafficking is a real thing in the world, it's real. So if you know that this whole thing is fucking disgusting and terrifying.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Rogan
And people are just turning a blind eye to it because their ideology, the left wing ideology, supports this idea that immigration is overall good and that you have to be a compassionate person to let these people in and that you're racist if you don't want 20,000 immigrants from a war torn country being imported into a town of 30,000 people.
Joe Rogan
And completely changing the dynamic. And then.
Elon Musk
But as long as they don't come to your town, that's it. They can just basically send people. When they sent like whatever, like 20 or 30 people to Martha's Vineyards, people had a heart attack.
Joe Rogan
They kicked them out.
Elon Musk
Yeah, they kicked them out.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they kicked him out.
Elon Musk
Exactly. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Anyone who wants to have vast numbers of illegals, they have to be prepared to have them in their neighborhood or it's bullshit.
Joe Rogan
It's so crazy. And the thing about all of this is if you don't have people that are willing to stand up and talk about it, if you don't exist, if RFK doesn't exist, if Tulsi Gabbard doesn't exist, if Vivek and Trump don't exist, where the fuck are we? Like, where are we? Where are we and what gets done? Are we just like the uk where we have thousands of people getting arrested and jailed for social media posts? Like, where are we? We have complete silencing of any dissent, Anything. Do you have to stick to the narrative or you'll lose your livelihood, you'll be outcast from the community, you'll. You'll lose your. Lose your freedom. It's crazy.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Well, if the Kamala puppet regime wins, they're definitely going to want to cancel you, that's for sure.
Joe Rogan
It's going to be a problem.
Elon Musk
Yeah, big problem.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. What about you? You gotta come for you first.
Elon Musk
I'm like, I think I'm probably number two on the list.
Elon Musk
After Trump. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Well, that's the last thing they want is someone with unlimited resources and intelligence attacking it. So people go, wait a minute, that guy saying that.
Joe Rogan
Especially a guy like you who's always been on the left. It was like having a Tesla in Los Angeles when I got my first Tesla was like a signal to everybody else that you were on the right team.
Joe Rogan
You're environmentally conscious, you believe in green energy, you believe in renew this. This amazing thing that has zero emissions and it's super fast. And yeah, everybody was in. They were all in.
Elon Musk
Well, it Is a great car, objectively. Like. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, it's not by it because it's electric. I mean, it's just a great car, objectively.
Joe Rogan
I think I'm on my third one.
Joe Rogan
My third one is being built right now by Unplugged Performance. They're doing a carbon fiber wide body kit on it. Dude, it's sick.
Joe Rogan
Changing the suspension, putting wide wheels and tires on it. Custom interior. I'm fucking pumped.
Joe Rogan
I'm pumped. I love.
Elon Musk
It's a super fun car.
Joe Rogan
Jamie has one too. Yeah, I love them. I love them. I. It's. It makes other cars feel stupid. Like its ability and the fact that you can merge on the highway. You don't seem like a douchebag because it's totally silent.
Joe Rogan
It's not like, like when you merge on the highways, just.
Joe Rogan
All sudden you're going 100 miles an hour. Like, what?
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's cool.
Joe Rogan
It's different than any other vehicle. And because of your company, now you see electric cars throughout the whole range of American cars. The only person who's resisted, the only company is Toyota. They've stayed essentially mostly hybrid. But all these other companies, they're all putting out these electric cars.
Elon Musk
I mean, the thing is that the right architecture, environmental or not, for cars, is actually electric. It's just like the acceleration is better. You can just charge it at home. I mean, like, imagine if you had a gasoline powered cell phone. It'd be a pain in the ass, right?
Joe Rogan
You know, go to the gas station.
Elon Musk
Go to the gas station up your cell phone.
Elon Musk
Speaking of cell phones, gas stations are awful. Like, who wants to go to the gas station?
Joe Rogan
How much thought have you? Because there's always these rumors and I've contacted you about this before, but there's always these fucking YouTube videos where they're talking about a Tesla phone that. Releasing a Tesla phone.
Elon Musk
No, we're not just doing a phone.
Joe Rogan
Have you ever thought about it?
Elon Musk
I mean, we could do a phone since like we, you know, like the operating system on Tesla, it's like it's Linux based, but we've written a massive amount of software on top of that. So like probably Tesla is in a better position to create a new phone that's not Android or iPhone than maybe any company in the world. But it's not something we want to do unless we have to or something.
Joe Rogan
What would be the situation where you would have to.
Elon Musk
Well, I think if Apple and Google, slash Android started Doing really bad things, like, I don't know, like censorship of apps or just tweeting people, like just being like gatekeepers in a really bad way then I guess would make a phone.
Joe Rogan
Hmm. You know, I've tried so many times to break loose the Apple ecosystem. I got an Android phone this summer. I was like, that's it. Because I love the Samsung phones, the Galaxy phones, the hardware is incredible. There's so much good stuff to it, but it's so hard to get off of the imessage. And the big one for me was FaceTime. Because supposedly the thing was you could have an Apple phone and send a link to FaceTime to an Android phone, and then you would click on that link and then you would just go to a webpage and you'd be able to use FaceTime. It doesn't work. I try to do it to myself. So I had an iPhone in one hand and Android phone in the other, and I'm sitting there with full WI fi, full cell phone service, and I'm sending myself invitations for phone calls.
Elon Musk
You just can't communicate between. You can't do a video call.
Joe Rogan
Basically you have to use WhatsApp. You have to use WhatsApp or Signal. You have to use something else that allows you to do that or Instagram allows you to do it. There's like different ways you can make video calls outside of it, but it's inconvenient. Like with an iPhone to iPhone. It's so simple. Airdrop, so simple. So many different things. Where. That walled garden that Apple's created is perfect. They've done a fantastic job of making it really convenient for you to stay with Apple. Yeah, I fucking tried. I gave it a go for like a couple of months. I'm like, I'm just gonna go straight Android. We're gonna. I'm gonna use signal for my messages. And then I hear that, like, signals might be compromised. Like, I've talked to, like, people that, like, the government can read signal messages.
Elon Musk
Like, oh, the government, if it tries hard enough, can read signal messages.
Joe Rogan
They can read anything.
Joe Rogan
All they need to do is have your phone number. Yeah, yeah. The illusion of privacy is essentially out the window. And that should scare people more than it does. It really should. Because it's like, who are these people that have access to all this stuff? And are they beyond reproach? Are these the most wonderful people, the most ethical, moral and principled people that have ever existed and they've been chosen to have access? No, no, it's fucking regular people. Yeah, regular people who happen to work for the government that make a decision like Elon Musk. Let's look, see what the fuck that guy's texting his friends. Let's check it out.
Elon Musk
Yeah, pretty much.
Joe Rogan
Bizarre. Just so bizarre. And the alternatives are you can get some wacky phone, some D Googled phone that fucking. None of the apps work. It's real sketchy. Your GPS is fucked. Like.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, well, anyway, I think this banking phone would be a huge pain in the ass. So it can be done.
Joe Rogan
But how much talk have you guys had internally about doing it? Has it ever been discussed?
Elon Musk
No, no. I mean, we're still. Right now Focus is making great electric cars, solving autonomy so the cars can drive themselves. We're building, you know, human raid robots. We've got large battery packs, like utility scale battery packs with the megapack, home battery packs with powerwall. We've got solar. You know, it's like we're basically trying to solve sustainable energy and autonomy. Autonomy and robotics.
Joe Rogan
Well, I think that's enough.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the plate's full.
Joe Rogan
It's always fascinating to me how one company can dominate a market. You know, like Apple's dominate the cell phone market largely by making the best products.
Joe Rogan
But also like YouTube has dominated the video market. That one's the most bizarre to me because it seems like, boy, shouldn't there be like a ton of options? It seems like it's not that difficult to pull off. But no one, nothing ever took hold other than X. Yeah. And I think one of the big changes was when Tucker Carlson decided to do his show from. From X straight out of Fox. And then people realized, like, oh, you can watch full videos on X the same exact way you could watch them on YouTube. It's not as simple in terms of like, you know, you have this extension in the algorithm.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it'll get better. And there is now, it is now possible to watch X videos on your. On your big tv.
Joe Rogan
Do you do it through what? How do you do it?
Elon Musk
You can actually just download the X app on your TV and watch it on your tv.
Joe Rogan
Can you do it on Apple tv? Like, if you have an Apple tv, you can get the X app and you just watch it. Oh, okay.
Elon Musk
So we'll make it so that you can watch X videos on big tv. It doesn't have to be on your phone or your iPad or something like that.
Joe Rogan
So what are you doing in terms of like integrating Grok and X and like, what are your plans for artificial intelligence when you're doing that.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So GROK is available on X. You can just look at like little box with the slash icon and the sort of icon in the middle at the bottom of your sort of phone app. And you just tap on that and ask rock anything. And you can type it or you can ask it verbally. And yeah, you can also. It's pretty funny. Like, we actually allow humor, which is, I think, pretty cool. So you could sort of, I don't know, we could like test it right now, see how it's going.
Elon Musk
like, what should we do? Like, rock roast? Like roast something.
Joe Rogan
What do you want it to like? How. First of all, what is it based on? It's a large language model. So where is it pulling?
Elon Musk
It's trained on everything.
Elon Musk
Internet, books, anything that could possibly be that's available in digital form.
Joe Rogan
So it's essentially very similar to ChatGPT other than it doesn't have the woke parameters built into it. Like, Google was the worst, right? Yeah, the Gemini was the worst.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, Gemini was like, people ask Gemini, which one is worse? Global thermonuclear war or misgendering Caitlyn Jenner? And we'd say, like misgendering Caitlyn Jenner. And then even Caitlyn Jenner weighed in and said, no, that's insane. Definitely. Nuclear war is way worse.
Joe Rogan
You see Caitlyn Jenner teasing Mark Cuban about transitioning. Yeah, that's hilarious.
Elon Musk
I mean, Caitlyn Jenner is based.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, but that is actually hilarious when someone who has transitioned is teasing Mark Cuban about transitioning.
Elon Musk
I mean, it is weird how much he looks like Ray. I mean, like, he's using the same glasses.
Elon Musk
Why did he go klepto and seal her glasses or something? Because they look exactly the same.
Joe Rogan
He's worth a lot of money. Why would he buy those stupid glasses? You can get some glasses. Yeah, well, it's like, I'm serious because I don't even care what I look like. I'm just wearing these glasses because I'm intelligent.
Elon Musk
But why do they look exactly like Rachel Maddows glasses?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's like what they probably sent him. He doesn't stick to the narrative. Here's the glasses.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And then when he's got the AirPods and looks like he's wearing earrings. So he's got the Maddow glasses and the earrings and it's like, okay, I
Joe Rogan
guess, you know, it's just a weird look.
Elon Musk
It's a weird look.
Joe Rogan
Super serious. These Big ass, stupid glasses. Look. Yeah, it's a weird look.
Joe Rogan
Like, you can get some cool glasses. Like, no rims, nice look, stylish.
Elon Musk
But, like, okay, let's just do it. Let's do a grok thing. Okay. Because I think you like. So one of the things you want to show is like. Like, look, we. We want a future where. Where comedy is legal. Obviously. As a comedian, I think you would agree, we want to legalize comedy, you know? Yes. So, like, I don't know. Let's like, is it like someone you can roast? I don't know. Roast.
Joe Rogan
Roast. Transgender men competing or transgender women competing in women swimming? That's a simple.
Elon Musk
Okay, that's an edgy one. Let's see what happens.
Joe Rogan
Let's see what it says. You spelled it wrong. You put an o in there. Okay. Age old swimming, where the only thing that was supposed to get wet was the contestants, not the debate on gender inclusion. If you're looking to dive into deep end of controversial waters, let's splash around at some humor.
Elon Musk
No, we need to. We do need to release grok Unhinged mode. So now go to the prompt again and now say no, no, you want to add to that one. Yeah. And I'll say, be way more vulgar.
Elon Musk
And use forbidden words.
Joe Rogan
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Forbidden words. Wow. Okay. What does it say? Oh, I see. You're looking for unfiltered, uncentered version of me, eh? Well, okay. I'm afraid I'm still quite the gentlemanly AI, even if my program allows for a bit of cheekiness. But let's say, hypothetically, if I were to roast this topic in the most un. Grok like manner, imagine a world where the only thing diving faster than the swimmers is the collective public opinion into the toilet. Transgender women in swimming. Some folks are acting like they just found out you can swim in the deep end with a different kind of flotation device. The debate is like watching someone try to swim with concrete shoes on.
Elon Musk
Now let's keep going. Now say be. No. Be more vulgar. Capitalize more. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
All right, here we go. So transgender chicks, women swimming, right? Some people act like they've just seen a dick in the locker room for the first time. News flash, folks. It's not the end of the world. It's just a bit of extra competition. Oh, that's weird.
Joe Rogan
The uproar is like watching a bunch of Karens at a community pool screaming, this is unfair when they can't win with their backstroke. Well, that doesn't make any sense?
Elon Musk
Yeah. Okay. We need some work here.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's interesting. It's going woke.
Joe Rogan
It's like defending the idea of transgender women now.
Elon Musk
Okay, we need some work.
Joe Rogan
Well, how about this more vulgar. But roast. But roast. The preposterousness of having biological men who are pretending to be women. Who are pretending to be women competing against biological women.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, obviously you have situations where it's like somebody's just saying that they're a woman, but they're actually not fully intact, you know? Digging both.
Joe Rogan
So we've got a scenario. Biological men have decided to take a walk on the feminine side, are splashing into women's swimming competitions. It's like if you show up on a chili, cook off with a bowl of soup and insist that it's chili because you added some red food coloring. Sure, it's red, but it ain't chili. And your soup won't win any awards for heat. Huh?
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's okay.
Joe Rogan
Not so good. Yeah, it's very, very, very. It's dancing around.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it is. Well, it needs some work.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Needs a little work. Well, the humor is a weird one, right? It's like. I think some humor, especially, like, some of the best humor is kind of spontaneous, like, in the moment humor. It's gonna. It's gonna have a hard time deciding what people are gonna think is funny.
Joe Rogan
The joke over time, though.
Elon Musk
Yeah. The rule with Grok is supposed to be that, like, if you ask for something, provided what you're asking for is legal, it should do it.
Joe Rogan
Have you ever seen the video where they asked AI to create an enlightened bunny, and they keep going and make it more enlightened, essentially, the bunny God. So the bunny becomes a DMT trip.
Elon Musk
Yeah, totally. That's funny. That's kind of what I was kind of hoping would show what would happen here.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I have a video of that. I'll send it to you, Jamie, because that. That, to me, is pretty bizarre because it's like, more. Get more.
Elon Musk
I feel like I might have got
Joe Rogan
it to do it already, maybe. No, I just told. Don't hold back. Oh, you said, don't hold back. Critics out here acting like it's the end of civilization as we know it, but it's not fair. They cry as if life ever was. News flash. It's like a marathon where something. No. Some people start with rollerblades on. Others, well, they're just happy to have shoes. Well, now we're arguing over who gets to wear the skates.
Elon Musk
Okay, some of it is not bad. Imagine if we applied this logic elsewhere. I identify as an airplane. Can I fly with the birds in the sky? Yeah, sure, buddy. Just don't complain when gravity decides you're not quite aerodynamic enough.
Elon Musk
So, I mean, some is okay.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. The argument is kind of stupid, though. The thing about the argument is they're not taking into account perverts.
Elon Musk
Right, Totally. Yes, exactly. So. But I mean, the thing is that if you provide, like, a moral get out of jail free card, if you say, like, if you adopt this label, you cannot be attacked in any way, shape, or form, you're basically morally invulnerable, then obviously bad people will take advantage of that. You're like, literally saying, here's an invulnerability card. Moral invulnerability card. Good people will take it, but also the bad people will take it. The bad people are going to be the fastest to take the moral cloak.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, 100%. And then there's a real psychological condition called autogynephilia, where people get aroused. Heterosexual men get aroused by the idea of dressing up like women and being around women. It's like a known psychological condition forever. And then you're allowing those people to just say, oh, I'm trans, and go into the women's locker room and get their. Their kicks. And then there's real trans people. So there's, like, a lot of variability. Like, I talked about it in my act in my. My Netflix special. It's like, I believe in freedom. I believe in transgender people, but I also believe in crazy people. And if you can't. If you're trying to pretend that people aren't crazy, all of a sudden, it's like, it just.
Elon Musk
It's just like. Like, if someone's a sort of consenting adult and they want to. Whatever they want to do to their body, as long as it's not harming someone else, I'm like, that's fine.
Elon Musk
You know, like, I believe in, like, individual freedom and, like. Like, my, you know, my mom's best friend, like, growing up when I was a kid was, you know, transgender woman in South Africa. This was, like, where, you know, she'd get beaten up a lot because it was, like, back then, you get beaten up. So her name was Dionne. And for a nice, kind human being and help my mom a lot, you know, And I think that's okay. You know, that's fine. If somebody wants to make that choice as an adult, that's cool.
Joe Rogan
There's a Big difference between that and an intact male who wants to identify as a woman. Who wants to walk around the locker room with his dick out.
Joe Rogan
There's people that do that just because they get off on it.
Elon Musk
Exactly. So you just kind of have something which is like a. Like I said, sort of moral invulnerability, or like, where you can know, like, even questioning them is you get attacked because obviously bad people will abuse that.
Joe Rogan
Well, that's when I got thrown into this whole thing because there was a fighter who was a biological man who became transgender and was competing against women without telling them that they were a biological man. They said they didn't have to tell people because it was a medical condition. No, that's not what it is. It's not what it is. Like, you can't say that. And of all sports, like, if someone scores more points in basketball, well, that's unfair. But if someone beats the fuck out of someone because they're lying about being a biological male, that's crazy. You're literally allowing someone to get brain damage because you want to appeal to the woke. Fucking crazy people.
Joe Rogan
Think it's all right.
Joe Rogan
It's so strange that. That. That's sort of the thing that red pilled me when I got attacked for that. I'm like, this is so nuts. I can't believe where at this stage where I'm saying, hey, I don't think it's cool if you pretend you're a woman and beat the fuck out of women and people like, you're out of line, like Natalie. Well, we're in. We're. We're in fantasy land now.
Joe Rogan
Now we're pretending.
Joe Rogan
Because it helps you. It helps you feel better.
Joe Rogan
It's just such a strange time. And if it wasn't for something like Twitter, where this could be discussed. What's more, I'll get some more major. Get some more coffee. Young Jamie. If it wasn't for Twitter, you know, at the early Twitters, you would be kicked off forever if you just deadnamed
Elon Musk
someone, which is insane.
Joe Rogan
Insane. Yeah, Insane. I mean, especially if you think about all the things that, like the look, the Harris campaign and what the lies that they've told about Trump that we discussed earlier. You don't get kicked off for that, but you get kicked off for calling Caitlyn Jenner Bruce forever for life.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Totally insane.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. But if it wasn't for you buying that and changing Twitter, I don't think we would be where we're at right now. I think it was a pivotal moment. I think historically, when people look back on it, it's going to be a pivotal moment in this very bizarre fight for the freedom of information.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean, at the time I said, I think, like, look, I think this is existential to the United States. It's existential to democracy, because if you don't have freedom of speech, you don't have democracy. Okay. Because if people, if you don't have freedom of speech, people cannot make an informed vote if they're just being fed propaganda. And there's no freedom of speech. Democracy is an illusion. So freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. That's why freedom of speech is the First Amendment. Once you lose freedom of speech, you lose democracy. Game over. That's why I bought Twitter.
Joe Rogan
And it seems so simple.
Joe Rogan
It seems so clear that everyone should agree to that. On the left or on the right. You shouldn't be giving the government. If you imagine the Bush administration during the Iraq war, imagine if they had complete, total control of propaganda and of dissent online. You don't want that. No one wants that. No one from the left would want that. We shouldn't want it from the left either.
Elon Musk
Absolutely. And there's also, like the media, like the legacy, the mainstream media, what I call the legacy media at this point, it used to be much more balanced. Like, if you look at sort of political donations over time, Republican versus Democrat, there used to be the media was, I mean, they always had like a left bias, but there was like, I don't know, it was like 2/3 Democrat, one third Republican type of thing. In terms of journalists giving, making political donations. Now it's like 95% or something Democrat. So the legacy media, the mainstream media is not balanced at all. They're just a mouthpiece for the Democratic Democratic Party. And you can see that in how consistent their headlines are. Like, they don't behave like they're different organizations. They behave like they're all one hive mind.
Elon Musk
So, you know, like a week before the Biden Trump debate, every media organization was saying, you know, Biden is Schoffer's attack. I mean, it was like, it's like, guys, Shawa's attack is not a common turn of phrase. And literally every TV station, every newspaper was like sharp be shot. I started a compilation of all the news anchors going, Biden, Shafa's attack, Shafa's attack, Shoaffer's attack. It was absurd. And there's obviously a huge lie. He is in fact, not Shaffer's attack, as the public learned one week later,
Joe Rogan
my favorite was Joe Scarborough. Yeah, that was wild.
Joe Rogan
Listen to me. This is the best version of Biden ever. The sharpest. Like, what the fuck are you saying? And then after the debate, he's like, what do we gotta. We gotta get. Get rid of him.
Joe Rogan
This is crazy. Like, what did you just say a couple of weeks ago?
Elon Musk
Literally. Yes, exactly.
Joe Rogan
Well, the other thing was there's flat out lied when they decided J.D. vance was weird. Remember that one?
Elon Musk
And then they just. Weird's everywhere.
Joe Rogan
Weird, weird. Oh, you don't want a weird guy. Meanwhile, you have fucking Tim Walsh is your vp. You don't think that guy's weird?
Joe Rogan
He's weird in every way. The way he walks, the way waves his hands.
Elon Musk
Yeah, he reminds me of the clown emoji.
Joe Rogan
He's a bizarre guy.
Elon Musk
He's a strange dude.
Joe Rogan
It's. I just don't. Choice.
Elon Musk
Yeah. It gives the creep.
Joe Rogan
I just don't understand why they made that choice. There's a lot of other people that are qualified. I don't know why in. I read that Kamala Harris made that decision when she was sleep deprived, which is kind of hilarious that she said that. So she's kind of admitting she kind of fucked up.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, obviously should have picked Josh Shapiro. I mean, governor of Pennsylvania. Like that would have been the no brainer. That's a no brainer move. Like Pennsylvania's linchpin state.
Joe Rogan
Do you think it's because he's Jewish, because of Shapiro, that like the anti Palestine people would probably. Or the anti Palestinian invasion.
Elon Musk
I think it was an anti Semitic thing. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
It could be that they thought that that was a liability because there was all these prohibitions. Palestine people right now because of the situation in Israel. That completely makes sense that they thought that would be a liability.
Elon Musk
But I don't know. I don't know the reason. I'm just guessing. But it seems like a crazy thing to do given that Pennsylvania's linchpin state, you know, it's like the key to the election. Why would you not pick the popular governor of Pennsylvania?
Joe Rogan
Obviously. Yeah. And other than that, there's a bunch of other ones too. Even Newsom. There's a bunch of other people that you could have chosen. Like Newsom would have been a fine example of someone you could. I mean, I don't agree with the guy exactly. He's a polished politician. Like he lies about as much as Walsh does, but he doesn't lie about this he doesn't say he was a fucking head coach when he was assistant coach. Doesn't say he was in Tiananmen Square. I mean, that's a liability. All those different things, lying about his military rank.
Elon Musk
Well, then Walsh, like, you know, cut and run when, you know, he was actually called to duty.
Joe Rogan
Well, he knew they were going to be deployed months in advance, so he resigned. And he also took. So this is where he was dishonest about his rank.
Elon Musk
Yeah, he claimed he was, like, a sergeant major or something like that, because
Joe Rogan
that was, like, what he was going to get if he. But then he resigned. Yeah, because he knew that he was going to get deployed. Allegedly.
Elon Musk
I mean, that seems like a cowardly action.
Joe Rogan
Well, whatever it is, it's dishonest. I mean, just to say. Look, just saying that you were a head coach when you're an assistant coach is fucking crazy. That's a lie. Don't do that. You should never do that.
Elon Musk
Yeah, saying he was in Tiananmen Square or whatever, or in Hong Kong, whatever. Like. Like, yo, that's one of the most biggest moments in history. Like, it's not like you forgot what you had for lunch last week, you know?
Joe Rogan
Right. And not only that, but you don't think people are gonna research that?
Joe Rogan
I mean, and the response during the debate was bananas. I'm a knucklehead.
Elon Musk
Well, yeah, we don't want a knucklehead for a vp. Okay.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, this is like, sometimes I'm a knucklehead. Like, what. What are you saying? Are you saying you lied? Like, what did you. I mean, this is where you need a podcast and not a debate.
Joe Rogan
Where you go, okay, when did you first say that you were in Tiananmen Square? Like, did someone say it and you didn't refute it and you got stuck with it? Like, what was. Because this is the thing about, like, carrying weapons of war. Like, what I carried when I. Like, and, like, you didn't deploy in war.
Joe Rogan
Like, you can't say that, but you kind of let people say. Say that you deployed, and then you kind of didn't. You know, you've deployed in war. So did you lie or did someone else lie? You didn't correct them? Like, this is the kind of conversation that you would want to have with a guy in a podcast.
Joe Rogan
And the debates were so fucking skewed, where they were correcting, like, particularly the Biden one, where they're correcting Trump over and over again and then correcting Trump with Kamala, where Kamala Was saying not true.
Elon Musk
I mean, Kamala deliberately repeated the fine people hoax and was not fact checked.
Joe Rogan
Well, not only that, she also said that no troops were being deployed in a war zone, which is, I mean,
Elon Musk
I know troops in war zones. I'm like, that's. And as vice president, you're privy, you know, like, you know, the official troops and the unofficial troops.
Elon Musk
You know, so what she said was like, flat out bold faced lie, flat out next level bold face lie. Have you seen the video absurd lie
Joe Rogan
of the troops that were watching it take place? Then what the fuck are we. They're watching it in real time.
Elon Musk
We're here being shot at.
Joe Rogan
But it just shows you the level of propaganda that we're being subject to, which is why people think Donald Trump is the devil. Cuz the machine has gone all out as far as it can go with with lawfare, with propaganda, with lies, with just pushing as much in this direction as humanly possible, connecting it to the Nazi rally like every step of the way. No wonder why boomers are like rabid. Like, you gotta keep this Nazi out of office. He's a fascist.
Elon Musk
Exactly. If all you get is like, if your entire exposure is to legacy mainstream media, so all your information sources are that Trump is basically Hitler, then. And you have no. And your friend group has that same information, you have no countervailing opinion.
Elon Musk
So then they actually just think like, Trump is Hitler, even though it's like a little strange. He didn't do Hitler things the last four years.
Elon Musk
You know, I'm like, if he's Hitler, why didn't he do Hitler things when he was president for four years?
Elon Musk
Like, the reason, you know, we hate Hitler is because of he started wars and did genocide, not because he was a snappy dresser. You know, And I'm like, so tell me about the wars and genocide that Trump did. I don't remember that. And he was president for four years, so it's insane. It makes no sense.
Joe Rogan
Well, and also he's campaigning on stopping all the wars. Yes. It's like his primary concern.
Elon Musk
Exactly. The warmongers like Liz Cheney hate him because they love war.
Joe Rogan
Well, they profit off of it.
Elon Musk
They profit off of war.
Joe Rogan
Which is insane.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And that this is happening right in front of everybody's face.
Elon Musk
Yeah. The war profiteers hate Trump.
Elon Musk
Which is fucked up. I mean, we should be like, yeah, let's vote for the guy that the war profiteers hate. That sounds like a great idea.
Joe Rogan
It was the wildest thing when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala, and the left went crazy, like, yay. Dick Cheney's on our side.
Elon Musk
Like, yeah. Like, I'm like, can we. Can we play all the videos where you said Dick Cheney was the devil?
Joe Rogan
It's the craziest turn. The craziest, like, 180 I've ever seen in my life. Because there's no reason for it.
Joe Rogan
It doesn't make any sense. No logic to it at all. Just all of a sudden, he's the devil.
Joe Rogan
Or he's not the devil. He's good. It's good that he's supporting, comma, even
Elon Musk
Dick Cheney, you know, I mean, warmongers want the Kamala puppet regime because they will get more war.
Joe Rogan
It's so strange watching all these Hollywood celebrities, like, step up, like.
Joe Rogan
And they think it's gonna get them more movies or something. That's what it is. If you know those people, so many of them are. I mean, let me tell you, narcissists.
Elon Musk
Well, let me tell you how it actually works. There is. What happens is, you know, these celebrities, they get a call, okay? They had a call from someone powerful in Hollywood, and that person says, you know, it'd be really, really great if you're endorsed comedy. You don't have to. It's up to you. But if you don't, they don't say it. They don't say it. But if you don't, you're just never going to get a call again. No more movies, no more concerts. They'll ask it. They ask in a really nice way. It'd be really nice if you endorse, comma. This is important.
Joe Rogan
And so they don't say that if you don't.
Elon Musk
They don't make the threat. They don't need to. But everyone knows what will happen if you don't.
Joe Rogan
Well, I think there's also. Even if they don't think that something's going to happen to them, if they don't, there's this compelling feeling to support this cause that you think is going to get you a bunch of positive attention and you're going to be on the right side of history. And all these narratives that you. Especially from the left in Hollywood, like, they're all in on whoever the fuck is The Democrat, always. 100%. There's never a call from the Hollywood machine to support any Republicans. I've never seen it once.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Ever? Never.
Joe Rogan
So it's like you realize that. And that whole business is based on getting picked. The whole business is not necessarily merit based. There's a lot of brilliant actors you never hear from. There's a lot of people who can do that, but they don't get chosen for roles. And everybody knows this, that you have to sort of socialize, you throw the
Elon Musk
line or you don't get chosen for the roles. Because there's a lot of competition for the roles. That's why I say, like, when someone powerful in Hollywood who's able to make to choose these roles, calls one of these celebrities, they know the deal.
Elon Musk
There's no threat is necessary.
Joe Rogan
Well, you could see it in real time, like with Dennis Quaid when he made that Reagan movie and they wouldn't let him advertise on social media platforms. They were banning ads for it.
Joe Rogan
For what? Because it was an election year. Like, what are you talking about? This is about a guy who's dead.
Joe Rogan
Guy was president a long ass time ago. Like, what do you. How is this, how does this have anything to do with the election year? Yeah, but it's the punishment. It's like you stepped outside the line. You supported the other guy.
Elon Musk
Yeah. The problem is you'll just, you'll just never. You'll just never get a call again for a movie or, you know, concert or whatever it is. Yeah.
Elon Musk
That's the issue.
Joe Rogan
I mean, we used to allow people to be a Republican and still be a movie star. Like Clint Eastwood. Reagan. Yeah. But Clint Eastwood.
Joe Rogan
Like during the Obama administration, Clint Eastwood was like an outspoken Republican and yet was, you know, a giant movie star. And people's like, ah, it's Clint. He was allowed. You were allowed to have. There was a variety of different opinions. Charlton Heston. There was a variety of different opinions you were allowed to have, but now you're not. Now it's just like. And once Trump, Trump got into office, he became this focal point where all logic was thrown out the window. And it's just, Trump is bad. You have to attack Trump. Trump is right. Right wing's bad. Everyone. Right wing is bad. Christian's bad.
Joe Rogan
It's just strange.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. So. Well, I'll say it again, man. I think this is the last election. If Trump doesn't win, this is the last election.
Joe Rogan
I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. I think people, and a lot of people are waking up and realize that that have been lifelong Democrats. Guys like Bill Ackman, guys like Chamath.
Joe Rogan
Tulsi Garrett switched over to the Republicans. Like, there's a lot of people who their whole life, they've been left wing and they realize like, I can't do this anymore.
Elon Musk
You and I used to be Democrats. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elon Musk
It's nuts, man. And you know, I mean, I think the things we want are just pretty basic, you know, it's like we want individual liberties and we want opportunity. We want America to remain the land of freedom and opportunity so we maximize people's personal freedom. The government can't barge into your house and kill your fucking pet. That's fucked up. And you know, and that you succeed as a function of your hard work and talent, not anything else. Not race, religion, sex, doesn't matter, you know. Yes, the basic stuff.
Joe Rogan
And then what did you change the acronym dei? What'd you change it to?
Elon Musk
Die. I mean, because with diversity, inclusion and equity is die.
Joe Rogan
But didn't you change excellence and.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean we want America. America being the land of opportunity means that we have an environment where you succeed as a function of your hard work and skill, you know, and that's radical.
Joe Rogan
Radical. Are you the best person?
Elon Musk
This makes you right wing now, you know, I'm like, okay, great, pull me right away. I don't care. So you know, you're not a real country unless you have secure borders. You're just a fake country. So we need. And our cities are unsafe and dirty. Like you know, my mom was telling me, my mom's like pretty red pilled at this point. But you know what's going to red pill you really, really fast is having your friends get assaulted on the streets of New York.
Elon Musk
And that happened to three of our friends this year. Got assaulted on the streets in New York just walking around.
Elon Musk
And nobody got arrested. Nothing. Nothing happened.
Joe Rogan
Well, the, the morale of the police is like depleted.
Elon Musk
Yeah, substantially for sure. The morale of police gets depleted. And then also like at some point, like, like if you're a police officer and you're arresting someone who's, who's violent, you're putting a life at risk, obviously. Because they might, you know, sometimes they'll try to kill you and then if you know that arresting this violent person, they will be immediately released by the da which happens in New York. Alvin Bragg, he doesn't prosecute people. Then why, why should a police officer put their life at risk to arrest someone when they know they will not be. They will just be let out immediately. Yeah, it's pointless. Yeah, it's like the friggin Joker. It's like Dark Knight. Like the friggin Joker is In charge.
Elon Musk
Like the criminals run free and the citizens are arrested. That like, this is why I keep coming back to this. Like still pretty shook about the friggin squirrel thing. It's like, you know, at gunpoint, forced the guy to like stay outside his house while they got his pets and killed them. Meanwhile, you know, violent felons are running free. And this is in New York State are running free. This is a joker. Yeah. It's not the law abiding citizens are arrested and the criminals are let free. This is fucked up, guys.
Joe Rogan
Just the fact that they have the resources to do that when they have all the crime that they have. You have the resources and the government resources to go kill someone's squirrel.
Joe Rogan
This whole idea of this Government Efficiency agency.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, call it whatever you want.
Joe Rogan
What do you want to call it? What do you call it?
Elon Musk
I mean, I think the funniest name is Doge. The Doge. The Department of Government. Of Government Efficiency. Yeah, I mean the idea is pretty simple, is that like we've got this suffocating massive federal bureaucracy and we need to, that is, and government spending is like bankrupting the country. Our interest payments on the national debt now exceed the Defense Department budget. The Defense Department budget is like a trillion dollars a year. Interest payments on the national debt are now higher than the Defense Department budget and growing like every month. So it's like, it's not like basically we're on a path to bankruptcy. America's on a path to bankruptcy. So. So we have to cut government spending or we're just going to go bankrupt, just like a person would if that overspends. But it's even worse than that. Like we're spending money on all these like these government agencies. And like I asked, I actually asked the AI, like how many government agencies are there? And the government isn't even sure how many government agencies there are. So it's like somewhere around 450, depending on what you call an agency. So there are at the federal level. So that's almost twice as many agencies as years that America has existed. So we're creating agencies at roughly two agencies a year.
Elon Musk
Yes. So this is insane. I bet there's like, I wonder if there's even one person who could even name all the 450 agencies at the federal level. There might be no one, but there's hardly anyone, let's just say. I bet most people couldn't even name like 100, you know. So this is crazy. So we've got the suffocating this Vast suffocating federal bureaucracy that just gets bigger every year and eventually you get to the point where everything's illegal, you can't get anything done.
Joe Rogan
So what can be done like with, obviously the President has a lot of power, but how much power? And what can be done in terms of like eliminating agencies, eliminating wage eliminating?
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean, so like if Congress has created an agency, then I mean often if you look at the law, the law is like pretty simple. Like the agency has like a very simple task, but then that agency over time vastly increases its authority and starts doing things that were never authorized by Congress. That's happened with pretty much every agency. So yeah, you'd have to still, you know, keep an agency, you'd have to match the law. But you can, you can curtail the agencies to be much smaller and say you got to stick to what Congress authorized instead of all this other stuff you're doing, which I think makes sense.
Joe Rogan
And so is the other stuff they're doing just essentially bureaucracy run amok or they just create jobs and create things to do and create a meaning for their existence.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's like a tumor, it's just going to keep growing.
Elon Musk
And it's so, I mean for SpaceX, Starship was sitting on the pad, the rocket, this giant rocket, we could build the rocket faster than they could process the paperwork to approve the launch. So we're sitting there for two months.
Joe Rogan
But do you think that they're doing that on purpose to fuck with you?
Elon Musk
I can't. I mean, maybe a little bit. I mean that would also not be cool. But another way to think of it is like the amount of paperwork is going to go roughly with the square of the number of agencies involved because they all have to meet with each other. So let's say in the best case situation if you've got like, if there's like, if you're dealing with one agency, that's one thing. But if you've got to deal with five agencies and the agencies will have to meet with each other, now you've got like, you know, 25 different, you know, meeting configurations that have to take place. It's just everything just, you get just hardening of the arteries. You just can't make progress. Like this is why we can't build high speed rail in America. It's basically illegal.
Joe Rogan
Right. So this has been the, the argument has always been that we need regulation because we need to protect the environment, we need to protect people, we need to make sure the rul laws followed. So we need a certain amount of regulation. But over regulation is a giant problem. That's a big issue in California. It's a huge issue. Anywhere where bureaucracy has run amok, they make it very difficult to get anything done.
Elon Musk
Yes. I mean, what happens is every year there are more rules and regulations created. And in the past, what has served as a cleansing function for rules and regulations is war because, well, we're going to lose if we don't kind of clear the decks. But we haven't really had an existential threat of war in the US We've had prosperity for a long time, which has resulted in a massive buildup of rules and regulations every year. And to the point where, like I said, like, everything's illegal, you know, and it's not like any one regulation is the problem. It's like Gulliver being tied down by a million little strings. It's not like any one string is the problem, but you got a million them of them. So we've got to clear the decks here. And I'm not saying we shouldn't have regulators. I'm just saying we've gone way too far. Once you think of regulators like referees on a field, a sports field, you don't want to have no refs. You want to have some number of refs, but you don't want to have way more refs than players. You don't want to be like, well, the running back couldn't complete the pass because there were too many regulators in the way. Because the football field's full of regulators. You know, it's like you can't even play the game right. That's the issue we've got right now.
Joe Rogan
Well, that's a great analogy. You know, I can imagine a football field that's filled with reference, like the
Elon Musk
football fields filled with refs, you know?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. You can't even run past them. Yeah, yeah, that. I've seen criticism of this idea of you coming up with this department of like, firing a bunch of people and what would happen and how would that work? But the criticism doesn't make any sense to me because if there is. If you measurably, if you can prove that there's a lot of wasted time and resources, which I think is pretty easy to do. And if you could say that this is not the most efficient. Like the most efficient businesses are generally private businesses or a company, because they kind of have to be in order to stay profitable. The government doesn't have to be profitable. They don't have to be efficient. They don't have competition. So if you're making cars and your cars break down, they suck. And someone makes cars, the cars are better, they're going to succeed. So this is the free market. The government doesn't have this problem when they're in charge of certain things that could probably be better served by the public, by the private sector.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, I just think we've gotten, we've got far too many government agencies. The federal bureaucracy has gotten out of hand and we just need to pare it down to a sensible level. And if it turns out that like there's some regulation or agency that was doing something useful, we can put it right back, no problem. Like it's like, oh, that regulation was important, no problem, we'll put it right back.
Joe Rogan
Right. So it's not obviously, no, but to be able to look at it logically and objectively. And you were also floating around the idea of offering a large severance to the people that you're going to have removed, like a couple years or something like that. Is that what you're saying?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, I'm just, these are again, just ideas. But I mean, the point is not that people suffer economic hardship. The point is just that there are more productive things they can do in the economy and it would be better if they did these other more productive things. And we didn't have this vast federal bureaucracy. So I was like, ah, maybe like a couple years of pay would be good and then they could take a vacation, they could take another job and get double pay. I mean, it's like, it's not like a, it's not going to create an economic crisis. I think it's actually going to be really good. I think because we can be, you know, people can move to where they're making products and services that are more useful to their fellow human beings.
Joe Rogan
The problem is if someone has like a 25, 30 year career of being institutionalized, you're essentially like a part of the government system. You've sort of programmed your life and your career to be a part of this bureaucratic system. And then you're like, nope, you have to go out and compete in a free market.
Joe Rogan
that's, that's scary to people. But you have to be valuable. You have to actually be valuable.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. I mean, let's look at like, you know, wherever the government pension and stuff. They're not going to be, you know, and tough. I think they'll be in good financial shape.
Joe Rogan
How are you going to have the time to oversee all this?
Elon Musk
Shit. Well, I'm pretty good at improving efficiency. I mean, I would say so. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
But still, this seems like a giant undertaking.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I'll probably need to beef obscurity.
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Elon Musk
But like I said, no one's going to experience, I think, economic hardship. That's. They'll be fine. People do find other roles. I mean, you can look at sort of like when East Germany and West Germany got back together. Everyone was basically working for the government in East Germany and it was really inefficient and that their economic output was like, in East Germany was like a quarter of what it was in West Germany because everyone was working for the government. The government's like, fundamentally inefficient.
Joe Rogan
So the best example is probably north and South Korea, right?
Elon Musk
Yeah. People are starving in North Korea, and South Korea is incredibly prosperous. And it's the same people, just different operating system.
Elon Musk
So, you know, it's just like you just want to move people from, you know, less productive things to more productive things. Whether. Because you can also say, like, in the limit, like, let's just say, let's consider the other direction where we moved a whole bunch of people that were in the private sector doing making goods and services and we moved them into the government as regulators. Now they stopped making those goods and services. So the stuff they were making is no longer available. Now they're just being regulators. Like, is that a good thing? That's not a good thing.
Joe Rogan
Doesn't sound good.
Elon Musk
No, it's not good.
Joe Rogan
Doesn't sound like there's a real market for it. Like you're creating jobs that don't necessarily need to be there.
Elon Musk
There are all these fake jobs, basically, and that doesn't make sense. So look, we've got to do this because the country's going bankrupt. Like, if we don't take action, dollars going to be worth nothing. And the interest payments, which are already 23%, 23% of all government income, including income taxes, tariffs and everything, is just going to pay interest right now. And that number is continually rising. So if we don't do something, the entire government budget will be paying interest. There won't be money for anything. No. There won't be money for Social Security. There won't be money for Medicare. Nothing. That's where we're headed. That's what bankruptcy means. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
That's such an insane concept.
Elon Musk
Yes. It's like, hello, wake up, wake up. And if somebody can tell me, can show me, like, pencil out the math and show me how this works, I'D love to hear it, but I'm just like, listen, I'm looking at the numbers here, and I'm like, if we don't do something, America's toast. There won't be money for anything.
Joe Rogan
Trump likes to talk about a lot is tariffs.
Joe Rogan
What are your thoughts on tariffs? I know that's very controversial to even people, economists, they disagree. Some agree, some think it's a good idea, some think it's a terrible idea. What do you think?
Elon Musk
I think you need to be careful with tariffs. I deal a lot with supply chain issues. Like the global automotive supply chain for Tesla, for example, is incredibly complex. So when there are sudden changes in tariffs, then you're like, well, we've got a factory, like somewhere else that's making a part that goes into the car. Now if that part's suddenly twice as expensive, it like, messes everything up, you know. So you want to be. Have tariffs be predictable so that companies can adjust their supply chain. I mean, I think companies are more than happy to increase manufacturing in America. It's just that you can't do it instantly. So if you put in and if you put up giant tariffs immediately and don't give companies a chance to build factories in America because you got to move atoms, like, you've got to build a building, you've got to install equipment, you've got to train people. That doesn't happen instantly. So you just got, you want to have for tariffs, you want to have a RAM so that companies can adjust and build the factories and train the people and get the equipment in place. Otherwise you basically just shock the system and it breaks or bad things happen. So I'm against, like, sudden giant tariffs because it's an impossible response. If you've got to move 1,000 tons of equipment, you can just, in some cases, collectively millions of tons of equipment. You just can't do that overnight. It's literally impossible. So I think we want to be thoughtful about tariffs and give companies a ramp. I mean, I do generally agree that America should do more manufacturing. I'm a big manufacturing guy. I love manufacturing. I've spent a lot of time in the factory.
Joe Rogan
Well, you've talked openly about the difficulties of manufacturing, how complicated it is, and about. Most people aren't really aware of something that's as complex as, like, say, building a Tesla.
Elon Musk
Yeah, manufacturing is super hard and complicated. So, you know, like, a lot of people just, they've never been in a factory or they don't know where, how, how difficult it is to make things, and they you know, for a lot of people, I think just ketchup comes from the store. You know, like the store like just has a. Like this is like people, like, for a lot of people who've been in academia or, you know, for all these like sort of socialist communist types, like they've never actually made anything. So they're operating on the premise that there's this magical horn of plenty that just outputs goods and services. And if someone's got more goods and services than someone else's because they took more from this magical horn aplenty. And I'm like, guys, there's no magical horn of plenty. There's no cornucopia. It's actually goods and services come from people working collectively doing a lot of hard work to produce the goods and services that you like, make and that you need.
Joe Rogan
But we've become very accustomed to these things happening overseas.
Elon Musk
I mean, America is still the second biggest manufacturer in the world. So it's not. Still make a lot of stuff, but we could make more, probably should make more. I think we should value manufacturing a lot more in the United States than we currently do.
Joe Rogan
Well, it would be very nice if we were completely self sufficient, like medicine. There's a bunch of different things that get manufactured overseas that we was a huge problem during COVID because all the shipping was shut down.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, you want to say like, so there's a lot of merit to the economics of comparative advantage. Like, so if you're completely self sufficient, what that means is that you make all this stuff yourself. And even if some other country is really good at making something, you still make it yourself. Which means you're going to have the inferior, more costly product domestically.
Joe Rogan
Right, Like Soviet Russia.
Elon Musk
Yeah, like trade. Trade improves prosperity. This is important. So you don't actually want to make everything yourself. And you can run this like you can think of this thought experiment on a sort of a microscale or small scale and then expand that and say, where does the. So at what point does the thought experiment no longer prove to be valid? Now let's consider the case of you as an individual. Imagine you have to do everything yourself. You had to farm, you had to grow chickens. If you want eggs, you've got to build your own house, you've got to do your own electrical repair, your own plumbing, everything yourself, everything. Now that would be impossible. Okay, now let's expand it to. Okay, you've got. But there's 10 people. Now you're going to have some specialization of tasks. Okay, well maybe one person could be really good at construction, Another person could be good at farming, but it's still 10 people is not enough. Let's go to 100 people now. Let's go to 100 million people now. Let's go to a billion people. And you still get the economics of specialization, like specialization of labor, where people become expert at particular things, still matters at a billion people or at 8 billion people, which is Earth. So you still want. You do want specialization of labor. You do want countries to be really good at a particular thing and make that thing.
Joe Rogan
Also, it encourages innovation if you have competition. If the Germans are making better cars, we have to make better cars to compete with them. Which is like one of the things that happened during, like the 80s and 90s, and America was making crap cars and Germany is making much better ones.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, the Japanese car. I mean, yeah. I mean, basically the American car industry got really lazy in the 70s and 80s, and then the Japanese and German car companies came in and just cleaned the clock, you know, and there was like an old joke from the. That is kind of telling. It's a very old joke where it's like, why did the Japanese car companies beat the American car companies? Well, it's like, well, in the Japanese car company, you had eight people rowing and one person steering. And in the American car company, you had eight people steering and one person rowing. If this was a boat. So imagine the boat race. Yeah, Boat race, Japanese boat, you've got eight people rowing and one person steering. In the American boat, you got one person rowing and eight people steering. And when the American car company loses the race, they fire the rower and it's like, okay, that was actually kind of true. Everyone wants to be the boss and everyone wants to do the work type of thing.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. One thing that a lot of people are concerned about is the potential disruption that's going to come about with automation and AI, that a lot of these jobs, manufacturing jobs, teamsters, all that stuff is going to be eliminated. What do you. I mean, you're at the forefront of this. So how do you see this playing out? And what do you think that can be done to mitigate a lot of the loss of purpose that a lot of people are going to feel? Loss of income, Obviously, universal basic income is being floated about, but that seems to me to only be part of the problem. Another big part of the problem is people losing a sense of purpose.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Now we're talking about something which is still pretty far in the future.
Joe Rogan
How far do you think it Is,
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, it's probably, I don't know, 15, 20 years type of thing. So we've got immediate issues, we've got short term issues that are 1 to 3 years, medium term issues, like 5 to 10 years longer term issues which are for like maybe 20 years longer term. I think there is this question of if you have AI and robotics, how do you find meaning in life? If the computer can do everything better than you can and the robot can do everything better than you can. But we're still, we've got a long way to go before that and we're, you know, and I do think it's like 80% likely to be a good outcome, like maybe 90. So I think everyone's going to have their own personal robot. And I think at some point wouldn't you want to have your own personal C3PO? R2D2?
Joe Rogan
So it's going to be essentially just like everyone has their own phone.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Everyone will have their own robot buddy. Like literally.
Joe Rogan
Well, it would be great if it protected you. Like if you walk down the street of New York City and you have a Terminator with you.
Elon Musk
I don't have the Terminator. Hopefully we got to avoid. We don't want this to be the plot of a J. James Cameron, you know, more Gene Roddenberry than James Cameron movie situation.
Joe Rogan
But it would be fascinating to watch some rich person walk down the street of New York City flanked by two giant Tesla robots.
Elon Musk
Jack Tesla robots just fully robots.
Joe Rogan
Somebody fully robot there to protect you from a bad neighborhood. Yeah, that would be very interesting.
Joe Rogan
You could potentially see that.
Joe Rogan
Restaurants probably have no robot rules. You can't bring a robot.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Leave a robot.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Leave your robot outside, your robot standing by the table.
Elon Musk
Man. If you just gonna be wild.
Joe Rogan
It's gonna be wild.
Joe Rogan
It's gonna be really unpredictable. Like, I don't think, I mean, you probably have a pretty good sense of it, but I think most people don't understand the wave that's coming. And I was going to kind of completely drown society and change it forever.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean it's, we have, like I said, it's. It's not like it's not going to happen like overnight, but it's 20 years from now. I'm like, I think it's like 20 years from now. I think there's going to be more humanoid robots than there are humans.
Joe Rogan
More humanized. Well, that's so crazy. Like, so that's like more guns. We have more guns. Than people in America. We'll have more robots than people in America as well.
Joe Rogan
You have a bunch of old robots nobody wants anymore.
Elon Musk
I guess early Persians or something.
Joe Rogan
In a historical timeline, 20 years in the past has not been that big of a deal. I mean, this is a big deal, but you go from like 1900, 1920, not that big of a deal. 1920, 1940, kind of a big deal. 1940, 1960, things start getting weird. 60 to 80. Wow, that's a big difference. 80 to 2000. Holy shit. Now you have the Internet. 2000 to 2020. Whoa. This is nuts. You have propaganda, social media, YouTube streaming 20 years from now. Like, what are we even talking about? It's going to be that much of a shift. Like, it's all accelerating and we're in the middle of it. So it's very difficult to sort of, like, feel it while it's happening, because it kind of just feels like life and you just get adapted to the changes.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, people's phones at this point are a supercomputer in their pocket. Like an article that can answer any questions. People take it for granted. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
They get mad if it doesn't work.
Joe Rogan
It's like Louis CK's joke about using your phone when you're on a plane. Fucking piece of shit. You're in the sky, you're floating in the air.
Elon Musk
And now it will work with Starlink, too.
Elon Musk
It will work with Starlink, the Starlink connection. It'll be like being on the ground.
Joe Rogan
Well, I was telling you how I used Starlink when I was in Utah. I was in the mountains of Utah. There was no cell phone service anywhere near. And we had full YouTube, we had text messages, FaceTime, everything. Phone calls. It was nuts. And it was this big cigar box.
Joe Rogan
It's crazy. It's so light. When I brought it out there, like, that's it. Or this is it. Just plug it in. And the guys I was in camp with, they're like, this is crazy.
Joe Rogan
The whole camp was, like, sharing it. So, like, 10 people using the wifi signal. It's nuts.
Joe Rogan
And then, you know, that's the beginning. I mean, what you're at right now is like, what version? This is Starlink mini. Right. So this is like a very small version. How much smaller can it scale down from that?
Elon Musk
Well, there's a certain area that you need. Like, the bigger the area, the more you can.
Joe Rogan
The higher bandwidth.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Because you're, like, trying to catch these like photons essentially. So you can think of the area of the antenna is the more area you have, the more photons you can catch. But we have a direct to cell capability as well that we've been launching that will turn on probably in a few months that'll actually connect directly to a cell phone, unmodified. But because the cell phone is a much worse antenna than a dedicated antenna, It'll be about 100 times less bandwidth. But still you'll be able to do text messages, pictures, medium resolution videos, that kind of thing.
Joe Rogan
One of the cool things about the new phone, the new iPhone, the iPhone 16, I got it and I was in the mountains last month and I was text messaging with satellites imessages and receiving them.
Joe Rogan
But still pretty impressive.
Joe Rogan
I mean what are we, what are we going to be looking at 100 years from now? I mean when you.
Elon Musk
100 years from now? I hope civilization's around. Yeah, that'll be a win. Yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
What are the chances that we fuck this whole thing up 50%?
Elon Musk
It's hard to say. I mean, I guess like I don't think civilization will be totally destroyed unless there's like some really massive global thermonuclear war. But I mean Stephen Hawking, he would say that there was like at least a 1% chance of total annihilation every century. That was his rough estimate. But there's a much bigger chance of civilization being less capable than it is today. So you say like. Well, because you look at say these various civilizations throughout history, whether it's like ancient Sumerians or the Egyptians, the Romans, there's like a life cycle to civilization. They reached a peak and then they started subsiding. So I think a bigger question is like will our technology level be better or worse than it is today? In 100 years. I think it's probably going to be better, But any estimates are going to be so there's so many dependencies. Like an estimate I think is. I'm not sure it has any meaning because it's like there's so many things that can happen in 100 years.
Joe Rogan
Well, the logical hope is always that people pay attention to history and they recognize the patterns and how civilizations have collapsed and they recognize what's going wrong in the current society and say we have to do our best to mitigate this and we've seen this happen before. Let's course correct and let's sort of manage what we've got here now and maintain what we've got here now because it's pretty extraordinary. This is what we're hoping for with this election, this is what we're hoping for with the future, is that people can see we are on a bad path and something can be done right now. And it might be the only moment in history where this is possible. Because if they do lock the country down and make it so that voting is kind of bullshit, you're only voting for primaries. And the people that they put in the primaries, they're controlling that in the first place. You don't really have democracy anymore. You don't really have choice.
Joe Rogan
You don't really have freedom.
Elon Musk
That's right. Yeah. I think freedom is fundamentally at stake in the election tomorrow. And we'll know. We'll know. I think we'll know by the end of day tomorrow. I don't think it's going to take. It's not going to be like days after the election. I think we'll know tomorrow.
Joe Rogan
Are you optimistic?
Elon Musk
I'm currently optimistic, but the biggest factor here is that men need to vote. That is the biggest issue. So I don't know what the reason is, but men just vote at a much lower rate than women.
Joe Rogan
I think it's like 9%.
Joe Rogan
Someone just told me that today.
Elon Musk
It's a big difference. And I'm just like, saying this is a message to the men out there. Vote like your life depends on it. Because I think it does. Vote. Vote tomorrow like your life depends on it. Nothing is more important.
Joe Rogan
I agree. Listen, man, thank you for being here. I know you're busy as fuck, so I really appreciate your time. Again, I thank you so much for buying Twitter because I really do believe that you've changed the course of history. I really do think you've created a pathway where people can actually express themselves and actually exchange information that really didn't exist before. And I think it was dangerous.
Elon Musk
It is dangerous. Hopefully I live long enough to see my kids grow up and people on Mars.
Elon Musk
That's all I'm asking for here.
Joe Rogan
I don't think that's too much to ask.
Joe Rogan
Thank you very much. Appreciate me on. Thank you. All right.