Thanks for watching. Full podcast with Elon Musk and Lex Fridman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxREm3s1scA

I can't believe how incredibly nervous I am.

It's kind of funny, the kind of things we get nervous about in this world.

It's as if we're not hurling through space at some incredible speed.

Well, okay, here I am talking to myself alone in a room and I feel naked before a large audience.

So first time just living up to the New Year's resolution of having a bit more fun.

And I guess this is what 1 version of fun looks like okay today The chat is going nuts.

I'm not Going to be able to at all pay attention But there's an amazing team of folks that I'm now working with.

I love working with those guys and they're monitoring the chats for questions as if I can do a good job of answering any of them.

Okay, So I did a podcast conversation with Elon a few days ago.

If you haven't gotten a chance to watch it, please do.

I thought I would do this kind of a live stream to answer any questions that folks have.

If it's not, I don't know what we're going to do.

And, I'll probably do these kinds of live streams on occasion, try to keep them short, try to have a bit of fun, answer whatever questions.

If you have questions about the Elon Musk conversation, I'd love to answer them now.

And maybe I'll do a quick recap first before I answer questions.

And if you donate like super chats or whatever the heck those are called please don't donate a lot of money.

But let's say nothing more than $42 let's set the limit there.

I can't I'm forever grateful and really humbled by that.

of the way, even after the conversation, is the

We've been going through a couple of years of obviously turmoil and I would even say suffering, economic and otherwise.

And 1 of the incredible things is on the supply chain, despite all those challenges, Tesla and Elon were still able to deliver on a large number of vehicles.

I don't these days pay as close of attention as I used to in terms of the deliveries.

I used to be fascinated by the number of semi-autonomous robots that are out there.

The hundreds of thousands, which is still incredible to me.

vehicles delivered in quarter 4 of this year.

Making that a total of almost a million vehicles for this year.

vehicles delivered by Tesla amidst all the supply chain difficulties, amongst all the growth they're going through, amongst all the doubters.

I think you'll listen to the podcast and you can listen to what Elon says about the dollars.

It includes the letters FCK, that, and you can fill in the blank.

Anyway, on the conversation itself, there's so much I could say.

Maybe people have questions specifically to that.

I just want to kind of comment on, as a human being, as an interviewer, as a researcher and a fan of the ideas in the field of artificial intelligence.

I took a lot away from that conversation.

1 of the things is the real gift that Elon gave me of, I would say, trust and friendship in just sitting there and thinking.

So the silence to me was really powerful, that he would trust me, that I wouldn't interrupt him, that I would just sit there and really listen.

And then he could sit there, we could sit there in silence and think.

I think silence is 1 of the most intimate things that 2 people can share with each other because it's having a trust that like you're on the same page.

Like with friends, with in relationships, just silence can be beautiful.

And in a podcast conversation, especially when there's nerves, where there's so much uncertainty, the mics are recording, silence is a real gift.

And it's, I don't know, like I said, trust and friendship.

a fan of podcasts how much I love the silence.

I used to think, actually the first time we talked I asked him, what 1 question would you ask for an AGI system, an artificial general intelligence system?

And so he took a long time to answer that.

So we got more comfortable through the span of that conversation.

And I actually, 1 of the only things I edited in that conversation was the length of the pause.

And later I realized that that's not, you don't need to, People can wait.

It's good to see a man, a human being, think.

That's 1 of the beautiful things about long form is You have as much time as you need to think.

We talked a lot offline actually and He sung praises to the engineers and that the engineers Especially like the low-level software engineers are the as he said in the podcast unsung heroes and They are to me to The people that make the compute infrastructure happen.

When I worked at Google that was the case too.

Yes, the machine learning stuff is the sexy stuff.

But the people that actually do the distributed compute, they're able to train the networks across a large number of computers.

They're able to even just like the low-level stuff, even the security stuff, everything, the whole thing, low-level software engineering, building a compiler from scratch, doing the onboard, so on-vehicle computation, making that efficient, making that reliable, because it's a safety-critical system.

The bulk of the work and the incredible work that's being done is on the low-level software engineers.

He's sung praises to them and even just the hardware.

I mean obviously the hardware hardware is where the magic is and also on the manufacture side.

So all the way down to the to the raw materials.

So going from raw materials to the manufacturers through the supply chain especially when the resilience of the supply chain is tested that's engineers all

the way down it's like turtles all the way down it's engineers all the

way down hopefully I'm not rambling way too long the other thing obviously I didn't know how to ask this.

So of course, in my usual mumbling way, I rambled on for a while and asking this question.

But Elon Musk seems, and it's sad to me to see, but seems to have a non-zero, non-empty set of doubters in this world.

And yeah, you could say maybe it's because of financial, because of shorting stocks and all those kinds of things.

But I know people that aren't shorting the stock, and they're still full of doubt.

First of all, to me, as a human being, that breaks my heart.

And also, optimism is the thing that creates the change.

But when I talk about them, I think the more interesting doubt is Elon Musk's own self-doubt and the doubt from people that are in the field of battle.

So these aren't just critics, but the legit engineers that doubt whether something is possible.

When there's all that kind of doubt, like you have with Starship now, like you had when building Autopilot from scratch throughout the history of Autopilot, what do you do?

And that's when you said, fuck that, we'll get it done.

I don't care about optimism or pessimism fuck that we'll get it done I mean, I'm gonna I don't know I feel like I'm gonna take that little clip and just like play it every morning for myself because you can get so lost into overthinking stuff.

The reality is just get it done and never don't quit until it's done.

And New Year's resolutions, last thing I'll say, off mic and on mic and Afterwards, we also hung out together for New Year's.

I think from the company perspective, just overall, first of all, there's an excitement for the future.

Like he tweeted today, I think, let's make this the Roaring 20s.

I think there's an optimism that coming out of this pandemic, we'll build our way out of it.

And that means both the software and the hardware.

It's again, the fuck that will get it done.

And that's, I don't know, that optimism about the new year is definitely just permeates everything.

So on Neuralink, I mean, there's a lot of really ambitious goals.

So on the Neuralink side, it's implanting into humans, pending FDA approval, all that kind of stuff.

Tesla Autopilot, like you said in the podcast, solving level 4 full-cell driving this year.

Of course, I could talk for a long time, I probably will, about each words in that sentence.

Because 1 is the technological, 2 is the deployment and the human interactions, the human factor side of it.

3 is the policy, like Is this going to get approved?

And then social acceptance of the technology, all that, in interaction with vehicles that don't have autopilot, other Tesla vehicles, and then other vehicles in general.

So solve is almost Like Wittgenstein would lose his shit over the word solve.

Like, you know, what does it exactly mean?

Is it under certain geographic locations and so on?

But the big point is that in 2022, there's going to be big leaps of improvement.

There is so much exciting stuff going on.

Of course, as a person who grew up in the Soviet Union, will he

To me, Starship and the number of launches that have been planned for 2022 on the SpaceX side, NASA, and everybody else that's just like pushing straight ahead into space, hopefully putting a human back on the moon, and hopefully soon enough, let me take that 20 second pause as well, Putting a human on Mars, maybe this decade.

That's why I'm training with David Goggins, to be the first human on Mars.

And my own New Year's resolutions in general, I've been working a lot on robots, but I haven't released anything yet.

This is for fun, this is not for the startup and the business side of things.

This is just, I love robots, I love legged robots, and I love exploring the problem of human-robot interaction, both in research and as almost like philosophical art in movement.

There's something that robots make us feel.

I want to explore it together with people by shooting a bunch of videos with robots, having robots hang out with me in Austin in public, walking around with them, inspire people.

If people are scared to sort of use that fragility to try to understand where's the fear and try to educate people grounded in that.

So I definitely want to build a bunch of robots.

Do a bunch of difficult interviews that are coming up.

I do see myself as somebody who, relative to how little I know, Anything that I do know, even things I spent several years on just feel so minuscule.

So I think I just lead with humility in these conversations, which I think can get me in trouble But I would like to err on the side of humility and love.

of people that criticize me, often rightfully so.

And I have to walk gracefully through that fire, not let the ego flare up to where you start to pay, we start to be defensive and all those kinds of things.

Instead, sort of calmly take the criticism, learn from it, grow from it.

And I've already had a few in the space of coronavirus, a few difficult conversations, and I'll have several more.

There's some other very difficult conversations coming up.

If travel allows, I will take a trip to Russia for maybe 2 or 3 months.

Take a journey of sorts to explore the language, the people, the struggles, the history, the future, the powerful and the brilliant, from the science and the technology world to the geopolitical world.

He's definitely going to be on the podcast, but not until I wrestle him.

By the way, I love wrestling and there's going to be a bunch of Wrestling videos coming out.

Vysotsky tf is definitely somebody I want to talk

to in Russian 1 of the greatest wrestlers if not the greatest wrestlers of all time Alexander Corellin, so that's a whole that's another part of my life that I just keep to the side.

I'm a scientist first, but sport challenges the body.

To me, science and philosophy challenges the mind, and I love doing both, and they both are a source of humility.

There's been a few challenges because of Omicron.

So I may release a few lectures on video.

But Unfortunately, given how many people signed up to the MIT lectures, it's just an insane number of people.

MIT is very nervous about what's going to happen.

to hug people with open arms and meet them and not be so concerned about masks and all those kinds of things.

I would love to give the lecture when we open back up fully.

And publishing papers, I want to continue doing research at MIT.

I have so many incredible colleagues there, so many friends, so many people that inspire me.

Most of the time I currently spend in Austin.

Like I said, I challenge myself physically and mentally.

I was dealing with some injuries, but we're getting close to

and we're gonna do something insane together physically.

That was a precondition I would say for a podcast.

I don't want to just talk to David Goggins on a podcast.

You got to do something crazy together first and then do a podcast.

I did a podcast with Tim Dillon, the great, the powerful, 1

of the greatest living comedians, Tim Dillon.

If you guys have questions about the Tim Dillon conversation, I'm happy to answer.

And he's yet another way I humble myself because he makes fun of me and I deserve all of it.

And like Elon said, try to be useful to others.

I really don't care about personal career success, about any kind of quote-unquote success, financial or otherwise.

I think about how can I build stuff, how can I do things that help others?

It's just fun and I think it also directs your mind in the proper direction.

You know, I'm a big fan of helping people move.

I like lifting heavy things But in the end the way I want to help others is just by adding

Love to their life in whatever way I can.

All right, that's it for New Year's resolutions I can say a lot more but let me just answer a few questions.

I wonder if I can just keep clicking on...

What does it mean when there's different letters before the dollar sign?

This robot is operating at subpar performance What's the most important book to you or top 10 a question from Joseph?

You know any do you agree with Elon that the best way to learn something is to talk to people and read I Don't know Hey guys is the is that super chat visible on the YouTube stream?

From Joseph, when I click on it, loading, loading.

I have a team of robots, all of which is superior to me.

This boomer is going to have to read some manuals tonight.

I'll probably talk about this more in the future.

I've read it many, many, many, many times.

I love people that are able to, through minimum amount of words, convey something deeply honest about the human condition, about human nature, whether it's the dark side or the beautiful aspect.

Despite what Michael Malice said in a recent conversation, I love The Plague by Camus as well.

Dostoevsky, The Idiot, by far my favorite Dostoevsky novel.

I don't usually recommend it because maybe you're not into memorizing 1,000 Russian names and keeping track of a bunch of weaving narratives.

I just aspire to be philosophically somebody like the the main character which is Prince Mishkin aka the idiot.

of his optimism is something I aspire to and a lot

And he's the 1 that says beauty will save the world.

And I think it's unclear whether he's supposed to, whether the naivety that he has is supposed to be positive or negative.

And to me, I would err on the side of that, of the naive positivity, appreciation of beauty, longing for love.

I agree with Elon very much that reading is like a superpower.

So talking to people, so talk to the experts, just like I've talked to Jim Keller a bunch of times and every time I talk to him I've learned like 10x than I would ever learn about it In any other way I would say in in the specific things we talked about so engineering discussions with

the experts is just incredible Are you a robot?

And for me, reading definitely, definitely is like, it's like a shortcut to learning.

It's, there's so many different paths and trajectories you can take through the reading space.

You can learn about human nature through reading history.

Some of them are full of cliches and so on, even advice books.

But still, when you cut through all the bullshit, there's like kernels of advice that can shake up your mind and truly help you, truly help you discover yourself.

Sorry, I get a little bit distracted every once in a while.

There's also just technical books or like popular versions of technical books like something by Sean Carroll or even sapiens, like looking at evolutionary biology view of life, or anything by Richard Dawkins.

Those kinds of things make you give you another perspective on humanity and somehow that kind of percolates down to your own life as well.

Lex, maybe you can turn on the slow chat mode.

I'm barely hanging on here and I'm scared.

I'm just gonna trust my team of incredible folks.

I don't know if they want me to call them out by name.

I can't, I'm not going to do a Russian accent.

I'm getting some Russian emojis from them.

Matt Affronti asks, love all the work Lex, keep crushing it brother.

What is the biggest lessons you've learned through talking with Elon Musk?

As I I take a 20-second silent pause, I'm thinking, in many ways don't listen to anybody when it contradicts the careful, rigorous, first principles, conclusions of your mind.

So your parents, society, friends, loved ones, school, don't listen to anybody.

If you want to define the future, you have to think on your own and take big risks with the thoughts you take.

So I just, it's not necessarily like a lesson I learned from him through words, but through actions.

Just the way we talk about anything, he refuses to be weighed down by the ways things were done in the past.

Listen to no 1 when it takes when it comes to following like some kind of hunger to create the new thing that you have.

But I should say it's not just about listening to the person, it's really spending time in that space around them.

I think that speaks to the fact that you should really surround yourself by people who refuse to be weighed down by the momentum of the way things are done about the expectations and limitations and constraints of society.

I love the internet and your username dear sir or madam.

Do you believe Elon has flaws as an individual aside from his career accomplishments?

It's the Robin Williams from Good Will Hunting, right?

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Elon Musk recap | Live Q&A with Lex Fridman