Elon Musk Clubhouse thread

Elon says he entered a pretty deep existential depression very young re: the big questions, e.g. "why are we here? why do we exist?" Found Douglas Adams. Thought a lot about why civilizations fail, for both external and internal reasons

Elon indicates that he sees a critical threshold re: Mars, where an outpost there can succeed barring resources delivered from Earth. He considers this a passage through at least one version of the "great filter" (Fermi paradox)

Sriram asks about recent UFO reports/recordings released by the US government. Elon: "I've seen not a single piece of conclusive evidence. That doesn't mean there aren't aliens."

Marc asks about Elon's comfort with allowing his kids to go to Mars. Elon says he's comfortable with them going after several successive initial landings — but says that so far, they haven't expressed any interest in going!

Elon: "People say I've gone crazy on twitter. No, I STARTED crazy on twitter."

"I've got some pretty crazy meme dealers."

"You've gotta have a good meme dealer."

"Neuralink starts from a concern I've had — where even if you have a benign AI scenario, how do you get along for the ride."

Elon says our phones, computers and attendant applications are already an important tertiary layer for our cognition. The problem is that our communication with this layer is ridiculously slow. "We need to improve the bandwidth."

We need "conceptual telepathy." Where we don't need to uncompress these ideas to save them externally. He notes we're getting into "sci-fi stuff" as he says we could potentially "save state" on our cognition.

In the short term, the idea is just to compensate for brain and spinal injuries.

"We went the extra mile for the monkeys." Elon says that when a USDA inspector visited the facility where Neuralink tests on primates, she said it was the best she'd seen for the monkeys

Marc asks what the best possible education for a 5-year-old looks like. He says his own kids seemed to have been mostly educated by Youtube and Reddit. "Explain the why of things." "We're evolved to forget things that are irrelevant."

Sriram asks how to encourage kids to become polymaths, and why the world doesn't have more Elon Musks. Elon says he felt a strong compulsion to do what he does. And that "long sections" of his life have been "very painful and difficult."

"If you need encouraging words, don't do a start-up."

"I should have at least... bought Bitcoin eight years ago. I was a little slow on the uptake, there. My apologies." "I was late to the party, but I'm a supporter of bitcoin."

Re dogecoin: "fate loves irony."

"I made a joke about bitcoin and my account got locked."

"You're not really moving the needle unless you're changing 1% of the existing fleet." (Re: Tesla's goals/making sustainable transportation.)

"About a million people a year die from serious car accidents, and about 10 million a year sustain serious injuries." The sooner the better for self-driving cars, Elon says

Elon says that when he talks down lidar for self-driving, sometimes he's "just talking smack." But he believes that for driving on real roads, "you have to solve vision"

Sriram asks what a typical work day for Elon looks like. Elon says he wakes up and looks for emergencies on text and email, and often he find them

"I'm getting a slight negative limbic reaction to email." "Anything's better than email, really."

"[Someone?? says] context-switching is the mind-killer, which I agree with."

I've been drinking whiskey continuously so my coverage is definitely going to taper off here, y'all

"At some point, I should take a week off here, clear my mind." "Maybe I should write a book of my experiences... that might be helpful."

Marc assumed that when Elon said he "slept in the factory," it was on a separate floor with sound isolation and a couch or something. And then he saw him sleeping in a room in the middle of the factory. Elon said he slept there because people working could see him sleeping there

Elon says he felt it was important that people knew he was putting up with the same strain as they were, even though that meant sleeping where the very loud machinery was

Sriram and Aarthi ask what Elon would do if he were running the COVID vaccine effort. Elon thinks the requirements should be relaxed for anyone elderly or with medical vulnerabilities, especially with the vaccines that are temperature-sensitive and only viable for short time

"There is going to be an avalanche of vaccine coming... more than we could ever need or want... there are more and more vaccines that are going to get approved." Elon says to focus on getting first doses out and worry less about conserving second doses

Marc asks for Elon's perspective on the future of California. Elon says he loves CA. "I got to Silicon Valley as soon as I could." "I tried to get a job at Netscape, by the way."

I just got booted from the room, probably some sort of error. Can't rejoin due to max capacity but will keep trying

Vlad from Robinhood talking now

Vlad: "I just randomly joined Clubhouse a few days ago to see what it was all about." Vlad says he believes the simulation hypothesis but don't worry we're going to talk about Gamespot

Vlad says Robinhood received an early message AM that they'd have to put up ~$3B to secure transactions for high-volume high-risk trades from the NSCC

Elon: "What everyone wants to know is, is something shady going on here?" Vlad: "I wouldn't put this down to shadiness here... this was unprecedented activity."

"The operations team was fielding this at 3:00... let's call up the higher-ups... they lowered it to something like $1.4B."

"To be fair, there was some amount of turmoil... it wasn't probably entirely unreasonable."

Elon asks if they had no choice. It makes a lot more sense if they had no choice. Vlad says they've raised the capital to relax limits tomorrow morning for the affected trades

Elon asks to what extent Robinhood was beholden to Citadel. Vlad denies that they were at all.

Closing music. It's over y'all

I didn't dare even break to pee during this, I hope it was worth it for you degenerates

Important to note that I didn't share a lot of technical deets that I didn't fully understand because it was hard to be sure I was capturing them properly in short-term memory. Check expert takes