Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - My conversation with Elon Musk: Cosmology, AI, and Dying on Mars (#398)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, everybody. Just a little morsel, a nugget of a conversation I had with Elon Musk about a week or so ago on what's known as a X space, a Twitter space formally. And it was really a wonderful experience for me to talk to Elon. I wanted to have him on the podcast for a long time. And I had to cram in my top three questions for him in about eight minutes, as you'll find out, in this very brief episode. And what I'm very delighted by is that I think I'm the first person to ever interview simultaneously. Elon, his mother, May, and his son, Sharr, X, A, E. However it's pronounced, they were all there. And his mother chimed in, she's quite delightfully here towards the end, kind of sating him from a question that maybe it was hard for him to answer. And maybe she recognized it.

Starting point is 00:00:57 he be the judge. Perhaps it was a little too personal, but I felt like I had to shoot my shot and ask him this question from the real depths of my curiosity and affection for him. He's impossible not to like. I really vehemently despise and oppose the viewpoint that he's an anti-Semite. I think there's zero evidence for that. There's evidence on the contrary. He's visited Auschwitz. He's visited the Kibbutz. He's visited the Kibbutz. in Israel that were viciously attacked by Palestinian Hamas terrorists in October. And he wears a dog tag with Bring Them Home on it. I don't think these are things that an anti-Semite does.

Starting point is 00:01:43 Sorry. He says he's aspirationally Jewish as well. So I was actually really pushed towards releasing this episode, you know, in one sense, partially because of him and the reaction that he's always and genders and people. Like I said, the calls of him as an anti-Semit. I recently had a very well-known podcast guest who's been on the podcast before, extreme left-wing kind of politics. And he claims that he left Twitter X last year because of Elon and the anti-Semitism that Elon exhibits. This is a world-famous author, very popular blogger, et cetera. I don't give his name, but you could

Starting point is 00:02:22 probably figure out who it is if you've listened for a long enough time. And then he actually had the temerity, the nerve to rescind an acceptance of an invitation he made to come on this podcast because of my having appeared on the Jordan Peterson podcast. And he claims Jordan Peterson is a vessel and vehicle for transphobia, which is another joke and calumy against a good man. As I have gotten to know Jordan very well over the last one and a half years. So this gives you the kind of level of insight into some of the characters who inhabit the discourse politically, at least, and I feel not necessary to respond to them directly. I think I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, let the haters kind of hate.

Starting point is 00:03:10 And I want to bring to you the most interesting conversation. So I did, as you'll hear, invite Elon down to Chile and the South Pole to visit our experiments. And I hope he'll take me up on the offer. I'd love to introduce him to the team and show him the opportunities. we have for astronomy. I think I was able to convey some physics and astronomy that he hadn't thought about before, which is kind of cute and fun and flattering for me to do. And it was just a great opportunity. And it was totally spontaneous and it was really a wonderful episode. So I think you're going to like this little more so, this nugget to get you through the weekend with

Starting point is 00:03:45 my new friend, my buddy. Between Elon and I were worth a quarter of a trillion dollars. And having, this opportunity was too good to not release on the podcast channel. Hopefully it's an appetizer for a much longer conversation with or without X. Shaw and without May Musk, his mommy, any way he wants to do it is fine by me. And so stay tuned. Maybe that's in the offing for 2024. Didn't have it on my bucket list. Didn't have it on my bingo card. But here we are. So now enjoy this short little morsel interview and conversation between me, Elon Musk, his mommy, May, and his son, Shah. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Starting point is 00:04:41 Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Brian Keating and professor of physics at UC San Diego. I got two physics questions. I'm hoping you can answer or chime in on. So I studied the cosmic microrate background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang, which discovered 65 years, 60 years ago or so. And this radiation is thermal in origin, and we are applauding your efforts in the astronomy community to make the Starlink satellites dark for optical astronomy. But we microwave astronomers who use signals we're trying to detect this afterglow of inflationary gravitational waves in Cuban, essentially in Cuban. And there's really no way to block out a million Kelvin equivalent signal that you're transmitting the Starlink. I'm wondering, is there any way we could work with you from the South Pole or Chile where our observation? observatories are located to have selective availability or some way. Because once this channel is gone, we'll never get it back. And this is, you know, potentially precluding a view into the, you know, inflationary origin of the cosmos. So I know it's very important to you. And we're appreciative of the astronomy efforts and optical astronomy. But microwave is totally different ballgame. Sure. I do think long term, the right place for telescopes or really any receiver is in orbit or, you know, basically space and you don't have express worth.

Starting point is 00:05:58 And as Starship starts launching, we can have some pretty big telescopes. We have, yeah, 10-meter diameter telescopes. Pretty hard to put, and they don't really unfold the way that Webb would. But I think it would be something that, you know, selective availability. I'm basically blanking it over the South Pole. We only have two locations on Earth where we would need to have it unobstructed. Okay. What you say, like, basically it's just stop transmitting just over these?

Starting point is 00:06:24 Yeah, the two observatories. Yeah, in the Outercoma Desert in Chile, it's 17,000 feet. and the South Pole Antarctica, which is a place we'd love to take you, by the way. Simon's Observatory, Jim Simons funded it, and the Athoscience Foundation funds the South Pole Observatorico Bicep. So if you have any resources you could put me in touch with, it would be really appreciated.

Starting point is 00:06:44 We have a technical update every week, so I'll ask about any observation in microwaves spectrum in Atacama and Antarctica. So yeah, we don't wish to anyway and need the purpose of science. That would be awesome. Thank you. I have one more question just related to physics and AI and related to Catherine's book, which brought us all here together tonight. So Catherine, congratulations, Mazel to have them a book.

Starting point is 00:07:07 So the book is called No Apologies. One of the things I hate most about chat GPT, woke GPT is, you know, you'll ask you some question. I'll say, you know, what did Brian Keating write? And I'll say, you know, losing the Nobel Prize, correct, you know, into the impossible, correct. And then it'll say, a brief history of time. No, that's not correct. And I'll say, no, that's not right. I didn't write.

Starting point is 00:07:25 That's Stephen Hawking. And then it'll say, I apologize. I apologize. I hate that. I hate the, I want the Catherine Brodsky, no apologies. But it made me think about a true Turing test, and I want to get your opinion on. I've asked Nick Bostrom and David Chalmers and your greatest ideas and thinkers, Peter Diamandas, our mutual friend. I said, do you know what Einstein called his happiest thought, Elon, that gave him shivers and titillated him? Do you know what he said that once? He said, it's PG, don't worry. He said it was that an abysmal. He said it was that an.

Starting point is 00:07:58 observer in freefall would experience no gravitational force. And it made me think, because to what extent could a computer or some silicon or even quantum computer could it even have either a happiest thought or B experienced the sensation of visceral sensation of freefall? So I'm wondering if you could propose another kind of Turing test, a different definition of AGI, which should be actually coming up with new laws of physics or new complete paradigms of physics rather than just, you know, physics is a base way of reality. I mean, you always quote that, right? So what to what extent could we redefine AI is when it becomes generally intelligent when it can experience happy thoughts, free fall and other things like that. So curious about your thoughts.

Starting point is 00:08:45 Well, I think you can certainly have AI would think it's a, would not realize it's in a simulation, which maybe the case for us right now. and that would have a true physics engine fall in a way that a human would fall and thus experience sensations in the same way. I do think there are some similations that are concepts does explain some elements of quantum mechanics, such as only collapsing the probability distribution when you look at something.

Starting point is 00:09:09 Like, why was something to the LHC when you look at it? Well, if it's rendering in real time, then that's actually how a video game works. Like if you're in a video, like to say, you're in World Warcraft or something and you walk through a forest and there's a rat and a rat appears. But before that, was there a rash or not a rat? There was only a probability of a rat.

Starting point is 00:09:27 And the rat only became real when you looked at an address. That collapsed in a rat appeared. So I think version theory actually explains a lot of things that seem quite mysterious with the Shrard against Kat situation. But it requires infinite compute, right? Because they could always say who simulates the simulator, infinite regress, right? It does beg the question of where is the simulator running?

Starting point is 00:09:48 Yeah. And it may be that you have a whole series. of nested simulations. But at some point, there is the undid thing. But ultimately, the physical real, I mean, all these things are going to be running on rocky planet somewhere, right?

Starting point is 00:09:59 That doesn't have infinite copper. It doesn't have infinite mineral density to retrieve. So, I mean, there are planetary limits to growth, as the Club of Rome would call it. Don't those provide? I mean, you can't imagine, you know, changing the physical reality of an Earth-like planet. You can't imagine these simulations

Starting point is 00:10:17 running on something very different from an Earth-like planet. It's not going to run on a... Boltzman brain. So at some level, it needs physical reality. And so again, you can't break the law of the physics. So how does it get around the planetary resource problem? You can't make an infinite number of paper clips on a finite planet. The universe may seem infinite to us, but frankly, if I was creating a simulation of this reality, I would put the stars far enough away that we do not have to simulate the details of the planets. And in fact, that is the situation. So you really

Starting point is 00:10:43 just have to simulate with high fidelity what is observed on our planet. And much easier task than try simulate world of reality. And I was joking. that, you know, when the James Webb Telescope went off, that maybe the reason for the blaze was that the simulators needed to bring more computers online. Because now that we can see further, they needed to improve the fidelity of their simulation. So, like, their equivalent of Amazon Web Services or something. If I wasn't at least pretty good at physics, then the rockets would explode and the cars wouldn't work. Because physics is a very harsh judge. I mean, I like to say that, you know, physics is the law

Starting point is 00:11:14 and everything else's a recommendation, meaning that, you know, you can't break physics, but plenty of people can break the law. And if you break you because it's here, you're either wrong or you need a Nobel Prize, but most likely you're wrong. Elon, can I ask you a question, a father of half as many kids as you have? Sure.

Starting point is 00:11:29 So I've heard it said, you know, you want to die on Mars. And our mutual friend, Lord Martin Rees, said, I just hope it's not on impact. And I agree with that. Being a father, you've got that cute kid probably right next to you. I mean, would you take us right now?

Starting point is 00:11:43 Yeah, I mean, but you have other kids too. And I mean, say goodbye to a child, is, I mean, you don't have to tell you that. It's the most painful thing you could ever imagine. But wouldn't you have to? I mean, wouldn't that be kind of the ultimate going away on a business trip if you were to do that? I don't know. I find it hard to go away on a trip, but I know you take your kids with you. I got one of my girls here with me right now and she doesn't want to go to bed. I mean, what would you do? I mean, could you really say goodbye to some of your kids or some of the people you love? Maybe your mom never see her again. Well, I don't want to say about it. I think we don't have to worry about that for a few more years. Okay. I think so too, plus maybe they'll want to come on the trip, right? You don't know. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:24 And maybe it would be quicker so you can come back if you want. You fear a lot of things in your life, but most don't happen. That's very true. Very true. Thank you, Elon.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - My conversation with Elon Musk: Cosmology, AI, and Dying on Mars (#398)

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