Elon Musk: Why I Keep Working With a $800 Billion Net W… — Transcript

Generally speaking,

everything you do is for humanity.

Why?

Why are we working?

Why do you care about the politics? Why do you care about multi-planetary species?

Yeah.

Consciousness, you mentioned that, or like, do you feel like that's being not the case or not true?

Um,

I mean, I think it's a good question you ask because it goes to like what at a foundational level, what is my philosophy and why does it lead to this conclusion?

Yes.

Um,

So the the reason is that when I was a teenager, I had like an existential crisis to try to figure out what's the meaning of life. Uh, it doesn't seem to be any meaning. For me at least, the religious texts, and I read all of them that I could get my hands on, did not seem convincing.

Then I started reading philosophers, um, you know, be careful of like reading German philosophers as a teenager. It's definitely not going to help with your depression. So reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, like, as an adult, it's much more manageable, but as a kid, you're like, whoa.

Um, so so then I was like, man, I'm just like struggling to find meaning in life here, and then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

And basically what Douglas Adams was saying is that we don't really know what the right questions are to ask. Like the question is not, uh, what's the meaning of life? Um, you know, uh, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the Earth turns out is a big computer, and its goal is to answer the question, what's the meaning of life? And and Earth comes up with the answer 42. Uh, this is where the 42 number comes from. And 420 is just 10 times 42.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

In in that book, where which is really sort of a book about, it's an existential philosophy book, uh, disguised as as humor, they they come to the conclusion that no, the the real problem is is trying trying to formulate the question. And to really have the right question, you need a much bigger computer than Earth.

And so maybe like one way of, I think way of of characterizing this would be to say, the the universe is the answer. What is the question? Or what are the questions? The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.

The more we can expand consciousness, uh, become a multi-planet species, ultimately a multi-stellar species, we have a chance of figuring out what the hell's going on. And so, and this this is this is why I think we should have more humans and and and more digital, both both biological and digital consciousness.

Um, and why we should become a multi-planet species and a multi-stellar species.

Is so that we can understand the nature of the universe.