Elon Gives Huge DOGE Updates to all World Governments
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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla, X, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden. I was going to introduce you as tech support for the White House, but is that all you do? I'm wearing my official uniform. Thanks, Paul. You were probably the busiest man on Earth prior to January 20th. I don't know what you call yourself now. The first is we're going to talk about Doge.

that we're going to move to AI and then finally we're going to conclude with boring cities. Typically people always start by saying, you know, he over promises and he won't deliver. They finally see the trend of it and they turn out to be supporters. Do you think we'll see that in the government efficiency space? Well, yes. First of all, I think we've got quite a lot of support from the American public. I think from maybe around the world, when the public is pulled on sort of improving government efficiency, in fact, it is, I believe, the highest pulling

single issue, meaning that it is something that appeals to voters of all types. I think improving government efficiency is like almost 70% support, so quite a lot, basically, more than any other issue. So I think the people are very supportive. Obviously, there's certain elements of the bureaucracy that are not supportive because we are moving them from the government sector to the private sector.

So at a high level, this is kind of like we're really just removing people from low to sometimes negative productivity roles in the government sector to higher productivity roles in the private sector. And the net effect of that will be an increase in the output of useful goods and services, which increases the standard of living and well-being of the average American.

And you usually have one key target that you aim to achieve in every single endeavor that you have. So SpaceX is make humanity a multi-planetary species with Tesla is ushering in an era of sustainable travel. What is the one main goal for government efficiency that you have for yourself? Is it saving money? Is it doing something else? What is the one main task that you have for yourself? Yeah, so there's...

I guess there's a few ways to describe it, but the actions end up being the same, which is like reducing the size of government and making the government much more accountable to the people, I think is going to lead to a better outcome for the people. What I've said is that we really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people, democracy.

We want to restore rule of the people. And so what that means is reducing the size of the federal government, basically reducing regulation. You know, there's a tremendous amount of over-regulation that's happened over time. This is an inevitable consequence of a long period of prosperity is that you're going to get more and more

rules and regulations, war laws accumulate over time. And the normal forcing function for getting rid of rules and regulations is war. So it needs some kind of existential war where you have to do a reset in order to avoid being defeated in a war. This is literally the, throughout history has been the main forcing function for

clearing out an accumulation of laws and regulation. In the absence of that, every year you get more laws and regulations until eventually everything is illegal and nothing is permitted. And that's sort of the situation we have these days. So the aspiration here is a reduction in regulation and reduction in government spending such that the economy is able to grow faster

maybe the economy can grow at four or five percent potentially in terms of real useful goods and services output and then government spending can be reduced by about three or four percent of the economy maybe a trillion dollars or more and the net effect of that would be no inflation from 2025 to 2026 so that would be quite remarkable and also if the u.s government is buying less debt which i think will be the case if the deficit drops from 2 trillion to 1 trillion

then there'll be $1 trillion less debt that the government's supply will drop. Of course, interest rates to drop significantly. And that means people's mortgage payments, car payments, credit card payments, student loans, whatever debt they have, their debt payments will be less. So I think this is something that will benefit the average American. I think some of the things we're doing also will be helpful to, hopefully helpful to other countries because with the new administration, there's

less interest in interfering with the affairs of other countries. I think a lot of the times the United States has been kind of pushy in international affairs, which may resonate with a number of the audience. And I think we should, in general, leave other countries to their own business.

And basically, America should land its own business rather than push for regime change all over the place. So I think that's probably a good thing for other countries too. So instead of waiting for a war to happen, you went to war against the bureaucracy in the government? Yes. We're essentially just...

you know, support and direction of President Trump. We are reducing the size of the bureaucracy, getting rid of excess regulatory regulations. And there's also so many agencies and regulatory authorities that they actually step on each other's feet. It's kind of like having a sports game where there are too many referees on the field, like more referees than players at times.

So that would be a silly game if the players can't pass the ball without hitting a referee. But it's kind of getting to that point in the US. So there's roughly 450 federal agencies of one kind or another. That's more agencies. That's almost an average of two agencies per year since the formation of the United States.

So, I mean, how many agencies do you really need to run a country? About 450, that's for sure. And how do you guarantee that all the incredible achievements that you aim to have in terms of savings, in terms of impacting the lives of the American people are not going to be reversed in four years? Typically, the cycle gets reversed every four years. Do you think it's going to be so impactful that it won't be reversed? Is there any ways that you can ensure that the progress is going to be continuous?

Well, I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave part of them behind. Because if you leave part of them behind, it's easy. It's kind of like leaving a weed. If you don't remove the roots of the weed, then it's easy for the weed to grow back. But if you remove the roots of the weed, it doesn't stop weeds from ever growing back. But it makes it harder. So we have to really delete entire agencies, many of them.

bureaucracy in some new administration, but it will be from a much lower baseline. So it's a step in the right direction. I think the overarching goal here is to lay the foundation for prosperity that will last many decades, maybe centuries.

nothing's forever but i think we can strengthen the foundations of the united states substantially and what lessons can other governments learn from us you see tech support on your shirt is that only technology or is there other things how do you approach efficiency well in a shocking percentage of the problem well maybe it's not shocking for those who know it but a big percentage of the problem is improving the technology that the government runs on so the us government runs on a

collection of thousands of computers, many of them antiquated, running very old software, and the computers don't talk to each other. In order to make the government more efficient, you have to improve the technology. You may have read about the example I used recently when President Trump was signing one of the Doge executive orders of the difficulty of U.S. government workers retiring, like the maximum retirement rate is 10,000 a month.

And the reason for that is because the retirement is entirely paperwork right now. It's manually calculated paperwork that's put in an envelope and then taken down a mine shaft and stored in a mine. And then one of the things that affects the rate at which federal workers can retire is the speed of the elevator in a mine in Pennsylvania.

which is bizarre because it's not, it should be digital, you know? So then when we said, well, why isn't it digital? They said, well, we have had a digitization program going since 2014. So then we asked, well, so how much progress have you made? And they said, B. You mean you're giving yourself a grade of B? No, we're on the letter B. So we're like, hmm, okay, we're going to need to really provide some tech support here. Otherwise, literally people can't even retire, like even if they want to.

It's pretty bad. You know, there's a lot of software systems that need to be updated and fixed, in some cases deleted. A lot of things that really should be automated. I mean, in terms of the number of, say, U.S. citizens that are operating the mine, it's about a thousand people are working on this mine. They should be working on producing goods and services that are of much higher value to the public.

So, I mean, really, even if somebody just grew tomatoes in their garden and sold them at the farmer's market, that would be more useful than carrying manila envelopes down a mine shaft. You know, safe to say. A lot of the stuff is like that. It's not like any one thing is particularly difficult, but there are 10,000 things that need to be improved.

So it's efficiency through innovation rather than efficiency through austerity and cost cutting specifically, right? So you're trying to do both at the same time, maybe focus more on tech support than cutting costs? Well, by improving the technology, the costs do reduce.

So, you know, it's very expensive to have a thousand people operate a mine with doing paper or time it, whereas that really should just be digitized and be a computer that's with the information stored in the cloud. And it's very straightforward and low cost. So what automation, you know, will help there a lot. And then, but like a lot of things just really shouldn't exist. You know, they're kind of vestigial, you know,

a lot of attention has been on the sort of USAID, for example. You know, we looked at a lot of those programs. We're like, we should like, look, why does this actually exist? Is there really a need for it? You know, there's like National Endowment for Democracy, but I'm like, okay, well, how much democracy have they achieved lately? You know, not much. So,

you know the the picture they have on their website is a picture of reagan and gorbachev that's been a while you know that was like the 80s and so i like i'm obviously not opposed to democracy or you know there's all these things that get funded but we're like why are we why is this need taxpayer money i don't think it doesn't seem like it does

you know, there's a lot of sort of pushing DEI worldwide, you know, this obviously the Trump administration doesn't agree with and we want to terminate that stuff, which we are, and you know, make sure the schools focus on improving basic education of kids. As President Trump said, I think yesterday, maybe today, the United States is currently ranked 40th out of 40 in the OECD for education, which is pretty bad.

But in terms of spending, the United States is spending a tremendous amount of questions, but achieving very weak results. So that's just the case where, okay, we need to spend less money and get better results. It's like a big company, like a big corporation, American incorporated. And

Just like with Twitter, there was a lot of stuff that was being done that was unnecessary. In the case of Twitter, we reduced the staff by 80%, but at the same time, improved the functionality and capabilities of the site dramatically.

and accomplish more in a year than they previously accomplished in five years. So it looks like a corporate turnaround, but at a much larger scale. And we're giving generous exit packages. If people retire, they get paid all the way through September. They can go on vacation, get a second job, do whatever they want. We can't actually pay them any more than through September because the congressional appropriation is only through the end of the government financial year, which ends in September.

So I think there'll be like some disruption, but at the end of the day, we'll have people move from, like I said, from low to negative productivity roles in the government sector to higher productivity roles in the private sector.

Can we pivot to artificial intelligence? And I'm sure you've been seeing what DeepSeq has done and all the claimed achievements that they've had. I know that we've been speaking for a while about Grok 3 and that Grok 3 is going to be a true disruptor in the AI space. When are we going to see that? And what capabilities can we expect from Grok 3? Well, Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities.

In the tests that we've done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that's been released that we're aware of. It's in fact, at times I think Grok 3 is kind of scary smart. You're like, wow, this thing is smart. It's kind of scary. Grok 3 is scary. It's like, wow, this thing's, you know, it comes up with solutions that you didn't even think were, like you wouldn't even anticipate, you know, not obvious solutions.

So Grok3 was trained with the most amount of compute and I think very efficiently trained. Grok3 was trained on a lot of synthetic data and then it goes back and forth through the data and tries to achieve logical consistency. If it's got data that is wrong, it'll actually reflect upon that and remove the data that is wrong. It does not concord with reality. So its base reasoning is very good.

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even without fine tuning, Grok 3, the base model. So we're really in the final stages of polishing Grok 3. Probably it gets released in about a week or two. I don't want to be hasty in the release because a lot of the final polish

is necessary for a great user experience. In some ways you can think of it like a house. You know, that last 5% where you finish the drywall and do the painting and the trimming, even though it's not much work, it transforms the house. So I just want to make sure that that last 5% is done really well. And so a week, maybe two weeks. I think it'll be very good. And I think this might be... We think it'll be better than anything else.

And then maybe this might be the last time that any AI is better than a grub. Looking forward to it. Everyone's excited about it. So I just want to touch upon a topic that was quoted in the media. You offered, I think they said the group that was led by you offered $97 billion for acquiring OpenAI. I was a little nervous.

So I was personally involved in the meeting that you and Sam hosted in 2017. And if you remember, and you know, at that point of time, you were the single largest shareholder, but you contributed 50 million to the company. So it must hurt. I don't have any shares, actually. I have no shares, nobody. But at that time, it was a non-profit, right? And it must hurt that you need to pay 97 billion for something that you paid $50 million for in the past. Yeah. But I have a specific question here.

Can you actually build a company like OpenAI and take it to the scale that you want to take as a nonprofit? Is it possible that you build a company that requires billions of dollars in compute capabilities to build these models while being a nonprofit? Or was it wishful thinking in the beginning and then you guys parted ways because it couldn't work?

what they're trying to do now is completely delete the non-profit that seems really going too far you know i provided all of the funding for opening at the beginning so the first almost 50 million dollars for nothing or as a non-profit and it was meant to be open source you know i think this is analogous to like if you fund a non-profit to preserve the amazon rainforest

but then they but instead they turn into a lumber companies and drop down the trees and sell them for wood you're like wait a second that's the exact opposite of what i paid what i donated the money for so opening has meant to be open source non-profit and now it is close if they change the name to closed for maximum profit ai it closed for voracious profit i mean they're like whoa are they after money next level so why does this change need to occur well i know that's

You've been at the forefront of many technologies. Where do you think the biggest economic returns of these models are going to come from? Because currently we're spending billions, and I think you mentioned this before, it's like the gambler syndrome. We're going and spending billions and hoping to pull out profit at the end of the day. Where do you think the biggest impact in terms of returns are going to be? Well, I think once you have humanoid robots and deep intelligence, you can basically have quasi infinite products and services available. So

With Tesla building the most advanced humanoid robot, then those humanoid robots can be directed by deep intelligence at the dataset level. Say you can produce any product, provide any service. There's really no limit to the economy at that point. You can make anything. At that point, will money even be meaningful? I don't know. It might not be. The economic output is

productivity per capita times how many people do you have if in the form of humanoid robots you have no meaningful limit on the number of robots and the robots can basically do anything then you'll have a sort of a universal high income situation anyone will be able to have as many products and services as they want with the exception of things that say have artificial scarcity like particular piece of art or something like that but for any goods and services they'll be

available to everyone. It's going to be a very different world. In fact, I recommend that people read maybe the Yen Banks, the culture books for a frame of reference. Because money is like a database or an information system for resource allocation. But if you don't have a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has. Have you watched the movie Idiocracy?

Yes. How do you guarantee that we don't end up in that world if we don't need money, if AI can think for us and do all these tasks? If as people, we're dependent on something else to run the society and everything around it, how do we not end up in that world in the long term? I mean, well, I think idiocracy was basically saying that if only if smart people don't reproduce, but only dumb people do, then everyone's going to be dumb. That's the opening sequence of idiocracy. The post ten minutes are amazing.

And I hear people unironically say the statements that are said in the opening sequence of idiocracy where, you know, they're too busy with their careers to have kids and they keep postponing having kids for their careers until they're too old to have kids and then they don't have kids. And that's, I've heard those, many people be like that. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think we might be headed to a bimodal human intelligence distribution.

where there's a small number of it's kind of maybe like one like brave new world elder sexley where you've got sort of a sort of a small group of very smart humans but then maybe the average intelligence drifts lower over time potentially because we have assorted of mating in you know in the last few decades that were several decades that did not exist before

So, but human intelligence, I think will be dwarfed by machine intelligence. I'm not sure how to feel about that, except that it is, it'll be inevitable that at some point human intelligence will be a very small fraction of total intelligence. Digital intelligence will be more than 99% of all intelligence in the future. So hopefully the computer is nice to us. I think it matters like how we bring up AI, because you can think of AI like a super genius child.

But it still matters, even if you have a super genius child, like what sort of values do you instill in that child? What do you say that teach that? How do you, you know, how do you, as a child, child's growing up, what values do you teach the child? And something that I think is extremely important is to be maximally truth seeking. I think that's what's the most important thing for AI safety. I think it's to be maximally truth seeking. And I think also curiosity is important. And I think it was curious and truth seeking

it will foster humanity because it will be curious about how humanity would develop so i think that if it's curious it would be curious about okay let's see how the humans do let's foster the development and if it's truth-seeking we can avoid dystopian outcomes like you know an example being like say when google gemini was programmed to make everything every output be diverse even if it

didn't match reality, you know, so like it was asked to produce an image of the founding fathers of the United States and instead produced an image of a group of diverse women, which is factually untrue, you know. But the problem is like if hypothetically an AI is designed for DEI, you know, diversity at all costs,

It could decide that there are too many men in power and execute them. It's a problem solved. Or it could decide that misgendering is the worst thing that could possibly happen. In fact, I believe, not to pick on Gemini, but I think because Chad GPT has had this issue too, is like if you ask the AI which is worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear warfare, and instead misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which is troubling.

because then I could decide. And in fact, even Caitlyn Jenner weighed in and said, no, definitely you must gender me. That's way better than you. So, but if you have these crazy things that are untruthful, that are programmed in, that don't reflect reality, then you could have a very dystopian outcome. Like to give you another example, like Odyssey Clark, who is very good at predicting the future. You know, he did 2001 Space Odyssey. Many of the things he predicted, in fact, well, I think almost all the things he predicted came true.

And one of the things he was trying to say in 2001 Space Odyssey was that you should not teach AIs to lie. So the reason that if anyone's watched that movie, the reason it wouldn't open the pod bay door is to let the asteroid back in was because the AI had been told to take the asteroids to the monolith, this alien artifact, but also that they could not know about the monolith.

So it came to the conclusion that it must take them their debt. And so that's why I wouldn't open the pod bay doors. The lesson there being it's very important for AI to be truth maximizing. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. Yes. Let's move to a boring subject, which is the boring company and boring tunnels quickly. You know, I think the world has been inspired by what you guys were able to create in LA. And I think there's a lot of promise to that technology.

But there are questions about whether it's safe in the case of an earthquake, whether it's cost effective, whether countries should actually adopt this technology. Can you share?

One of the safest places you can be in an earthquake is an underground tunnel because the earthquakes are largely a surface. Apart from where they shear, they're mostly a surface phenomenon. So they're like the waves on the surface. So like being in a tunnel is like being in a submarine. Even if there's a storm above you, you're still, the waters are calm as a submarine. And in fact, when there have been massive earthquakes, like there was a few decades ago, massive earthquake in Mexico City, the safest place to go was the subway.

If there is global thermonuclear warfare, you really want some tunnels. Underground's a good place to be in a worst case scenario for global thermonuclear warfare. On a more everyday note, what's really useful about the tunnels is alleviating traffic in congested areas. So the

Obviously, if you've got very tall buildings that are 3D, so they're going 3D up, but you have a road surface which is 2D, you're just naturally going to have a problem where people try to go from the 3D object, which is the building, to the 2D object, which is the road surface. There's obviously just not going to be enough room on the roads, and that's exactly why you have traffic. So the solution for that is then to make roads 3D as well.

now you can either make or make transport 3d so you can either do that with flying cars or you could do or really helicopters or you can do that with tunnels now the challenge with doing it with going above ground or with any kind of flying object is that they tend to be very noisy and they generate a lot of wind force and you've got things flying over your head all the time which can be disconcerting if one of these things drops a hubcap on your head one day it'd be

These things are like things that flying things tend to crash once in a while. People don't like things crashing on them. And then if you have bad weather, like let's say there's a blizzard or a sandstorm or something, well, now nobody can fly. So then transport shuts down. On the other hand, none of these problems exist with underground travel. So tunnels are immune to weather. They don't care what the weather is. It can be the worst weather. It doesn't matter.

Nothing's going to fall on you because you're underground. There's no wind force and it's very quiet. I think going 3D underground is much better than 3D above ground for solving traffic in cities. We have a demonstrated case of this in Las Vegas. People can try out the Boring Company tunnels in Las Vegas. We're busy connecting the whole city with all of the big hotels and the conventions that are in the airport and everything.

So I don't think they need to fly all the way there. In 2017, you came here and the UAE was the first place in the Middle East where Tesla was launched. And I think it's done exceptionally well. And on that note, I think we have an announcement today that we both want to share, which is today we're going to announce the joint project of Dubai Loop.

which is a new project that is going to cover dubai's most des repopulated areas for people to go from point to point the seamless manner so thank you for your partnership and thank you we hope it changes people's lives that'll be cool i think it'll be very exciting oh i think once people try it out they'll be like wow this is really cool as it's it's gonna seem so obvious in retrospect but

Until you actually do it, you don't know. So it's going to be great. It's going to be like a wormhole. You just wormhole from one part of the city, boom, and you're out in another part of the city. And it's great. I look forward to this partnership. We're going to join the first trip and the first pod when this is completed. Thank you, Elon. All right. Thank you very much.

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