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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Charles Steel our special guest, the Curious Mind of Elon Musk.

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Speaker 2: Was it difficult putting the book together? Charles?

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Speaker 3: Yes.

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Speaker 4: I would not recommend to anyone that they write a

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Speaker 4: book unless they unless they accept that it might take

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Speaker 4: twice as long as they think to write it.

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Speaker 2: It's pretty complimentary to Musk. You know that.

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Speaker 3: Well.

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Speaker 4: I've been told that my goal was to set out

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Speaker 4: what he thinks, to put it, to put his point

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Speaker 4: of view in his words, and then to let the

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Speaker 4: reader judge for themselves.

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Speaker 3: And that's why it's subtitled nine Weighty Things.

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Speaker 4: Differently, I'm trying to show people that if you step

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Speaker 4: into his shoes, this is how he sees the world.

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Speaker 4: I try not to pass heavy judgment on whether that's

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Speaker 4: something that you should try and do or not.

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Speaker 2: What happened between President Trump and Elon Musk seem to

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Speaker 2: the feuded. Musk came in aboard to run doge and

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Speaker 2: then they fell apart again.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, for me, there was always an element where it

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Speaker 4: was a bit of a marriage of convenience. I think

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Speaker 4: the role that Trump played for Musk was to stop

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Speaker 4: Harris winning. That was the principal thing, because he felt

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Speaker 4: so strongly on the subject of wokeness.

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Speaker 3: And so on.

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Speaker 4: They had disagreed on quite a lot of things in

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Speaker 4: the past, from free trade to electorate vehicles. I think

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Speaker 4: Musk has said that he didn't.

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Speaker 3: Believe that the that the.

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Speaker 4: Previous election was stolen from Trump, So it's not as

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Speaker 4: though they were natural bedfellows. However, I think they had

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Speaker 4: quite a good camaraderie.

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Speaker 3: They agreed in a lot of stuff. There was a

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Speaker 3: mutual fascination.

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Speaker 4: Musk believed he could do a job for Trump in

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Speaker 4: terms of cutting into federal spending. But at the end

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Speaker 4: of the day, I believe that and this is one

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Speaker 4: of the an example of how unusual Musk is.

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Speaker 3: He feels very.

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Speaker 4: Strongly about national debt. And when the big beautiful bill

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Speaker 4: was put forward, you know, Musk called it an abomination,

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Speaker 4: a disgusting abomination, because for him, Trump did not sorry, yeah,

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Speaker 4: Trump did not have a mandate to do that, and

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Speaker 4: he and Musk kind of believes it's morally wrong for

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Speaker 4: in this case, the federal government to spend seven trillion

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Speaker 4: dollars but only raised five trillion, and therefore had that

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Speaker 4: huge deficit, and under the bill, the deficit was actually increasing,

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Speaker 4: And so for.

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Speaker 3: For Musk this was unconscionable.

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Speaker 4: Now people will point to, you know, big egos, rivalries

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Speaker 4: and so on, but I think that question of the

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Speaker 4: bill actually is far more important than people realize.

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Speaker 2: Why is he so obsessed with space? Ah? Well?

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Speaker 3: I think this is true on many levels.

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Speaker 4: So I mean, first of all, if you want to

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Speaker 4: increase consciousness, that's literally the best way to do it,

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Speaker 4: isn't it just to go out there and to populate

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Speaker 4: the universe, to make it like a you know, a

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Speaker 4: universe that we read about in the novels of Isaac Asimov.

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Speaker 4: I think there's also an element, and I mentioned earlier

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Speaker 4: this sort of notion of human consciousness as a flickering

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Speaker 4: in candle in a vast darkness where you know it

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Speaker 4: must does have some existential angst. And if you have that,

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Speaker 4: the best way.

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Speaker 3: To do it is to rebel.

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Speaker 4: And what better way to rebel than to fire rockets

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Speaker 4: and put people into space. So I think on a

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Speaker 4: sort of psychological philosophical element that's really important. And then

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Speaker 4: Musk is an engineer, what can be more challenging? He

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Speaker 4: describes rockets as being at the ragged edge of physics.

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Speaker 4: By that, I mean reusable rockets. So he is getting

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Speaker 4: tremendous purpose from putting people into space, building incredible machines.

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Speaker 3: And lately, I'm.

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Speaker 4: Sure you've seen he talks increasingly about the card chef scale,

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Speaker 4: and he thinks in civilizational terms, and so the card

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Speaker 4: chef scale measures the amount of energy a civilization uses

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Speaker 4: relative to the energy of a planet, a star, and

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Speaker 4: a galaxy. And he says that we're currently at about

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Speaker 4: one percent of the energy available on Earth, and if

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Speaker 4: we increase that a million times, we would still be

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Speaker 4: only using a million of the energy from the Sun.

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Speaker 4: So that's kind of the huge proportions that he thinks

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Speaker 4: in that's the level of the ambition, and.

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Speaker 3: So this is what drives him forward.

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Speaker 4: And then the last thing I'd mentioned George is, you know,

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Speaker 4: it comes back to the theme of curiosity.

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Speaker 3: He wants to know the meaning of life, and he.

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Speaker 4: Believes the answers are out there, and he was just

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Speaker 4: tweeting yesterday about eventually he'll put huge telescopes on the Moon.

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Speaker 4: I think he thinks we need to go out there

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Speaker 4: to find, you know, to find the answers to these questions.

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Speaker 2: He seemed to have been a big booster of getting

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Speaker 2: the astronauts to Mars, and he seems to have shifted.

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Speaker 3: Now, yeah, that's that's that's well observed.

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Speaker 4: I mean, some people have always said that Mars has

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Speaker 4: just been a pr stunt and he doesn't and you know,

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Speaker 4: he never really meant it.

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Speaker 3: I really don't think that's true.

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Speaker 4: I think if you look at the early days of SpaceX,

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Speaker 4: his original plan to do Mars oasis, I think it's

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Speaker 4: incontestable to say that that's true. And there's there's a

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Speaker 4: very good example of that. I mean, there are many,

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Speaker 4: but I'll just give you one. When he designed Starship

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Speaker 4: for the fuel for the upper stage of the rocket,

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Speaker 4: he chose methane because that uses carbon and hydrogen and

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Speaker 4: those are available on Mars. They're not available on the Moon.

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Speaker 4: So for the Moon, Bezos, for example, will be you

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Speaker 4: using hydrogen oxygen. He wouldn't have done that if if

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Speaker 4: he wasn't serious about Mars. But Moon is obviously coming

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Speaker 4: to the forefront. A bunch of reasons for that. First

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Speaker 4: of all, the window to go to Mars is closing.

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Speaker 4: It's called the home and orbit transfer, I think, and

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Speaker 4: it closes at the end of this year and then

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Speaker 4: it's closed for twenty six months, so he needs to

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Speaker 4: be keeping busy. In the meantime, there's the Artimist program

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Speaker 4: coming along, and there's competition from Bezos, who has an

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Speaker 4: alternative offering his with his his new Glen rocket. And

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Speaker 4: then there's the NASA's SLS rocket out there, which Musk

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Speaker 4: needs to keep up with as well.

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Speaker 3: So there's a lot going on on that front.

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Speaker 4: But I think maybe the biggest recent thing is for

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Speaker 4: the Moon. For Musk, the Moon was always a case

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Speaker 4: of going backwards.

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Speaker 3: You know, we'd been.

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Speaker 4: There with the Apollo program, and Musk really was unhappy

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Speaker 4: about the luring of ambition that happened following that with

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Speaker 4: a Space Shuttle. But now if we're going back to

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Speaker 4: the Moon, it's not to do what we were doing before.

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Speaker 3: It's to build a base.

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Speaker 4: And so the exciting thing that's happening now is that

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Speaker 4: people are talking about putting data centers in space. There's

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Speaker 4: much more availability of solar energy up there, and Musk

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Speaker 4: has I think he said that between them, Tesla and

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Speaker 4: SpaceX need to be generating one hundred.

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Speaker 3: Gigawatts of solar power.

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Speaker 4: He wants to get that up into space, but it's

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Speaker 4: tough doing that, you know, through the Earth's atmosphere, much

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Speaker 4: easier to do it from the Moon. And so he

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Speaker 4: has a vision that and this is the stuff of

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Speaker 4: science fiction that you can put a pile driver on

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Speaker 4: the Moon. The gravity on the Moon is one sixth

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Speaker 4: of what it is on Earth, and you can actually

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Speaker 4: you can put hundreds of I earlier said gigawatts. I

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Speaker 4: meant terrawats. You can put hundreds of terror what's of

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Speaker 4: solar powered data centers into space if you use the

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Speaker 4: if you use the Moon.

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Speaker 3: So that's exciting.

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Speaker 4: And he's talking about that a lot ahead of the

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Speaker 4: SpaceX IPO.

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Speaker 5: And I know you're gonna want someth after hearing this.

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Speaker 5: This is an amazing story.

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Speaker 1: We've got Stephen and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand.

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Speaker 5: Now I understand that Malachi, who's eight almost nine years

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Speaker 5: old now, was suffering with not just one or two warts,

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Speaker 5: but I mean a significant outbreak of warts all over

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Speaker 5: his body, so significant it impacted his ability to really function.

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Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil.

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Speaker 6: To right of Tie's book. Actually that got me thinking

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Speaker 6: about it.

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Speaker 1: I'm not surprised.

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Speaker 6: It is an amazing immuno modulator, and so I can

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Speaker 6: see that it would work.

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Speaker 5: And so at what point did you see that there

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Speaker 5: was actually improvement it's really going to work.

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Speaker 6: Well, look, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.

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Speaker 6: You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller

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Speaker 6: and then going down to with a just rid marks.

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Speaker 6: The whole things are gone and we're talking about what's

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Speaker 6: you know one that size for Wanner? I thought, no way,

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Speaker 6: that's gonna Wow. That's just been miraculous to see him

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Speaker 6: get into a pair of shoes.

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Speaker 5: Yes, how wonderful.

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Speaker 6: It's great to see.

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Speaker 1: I'm so happy and yes.

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Speaker 5: Confident, absolutely wonderful.

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Speaker 1: For instead of seen it that is blown away.

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Speaker 2: TI, this is awesome.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, this is awesome.

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Speaker 7: Another amazing story. Why we're talking about Carnivora. Call them

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Speaker 7: to awaken your immune system and protect yourself now called

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Speaker 7: one eight sixty six eight three six eighty seven thirty five.

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Speaker 7: That's one eight six six eight three six eighty seven

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Speaker 7: thirty five, or visit carnivora dot com c A r

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Speaker 7: niv O r A carnivora dot com.

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Speaker 2: Elon Musk has launched some mode like ten thousand active

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Speaker 2: Starlink shed lights what is he doing.

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Speaker 4: Well, this is bringing the Internet to people via space

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Speaker 4: who don't live in urban areas. People in urban areas

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Speaker 4: are well served by the mobile it works. But if

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Speaker 4: you live in a rural area, if you're on a boat,

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Speaker 4: if you're on a plane, then it's that's not the case.

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Speaker 4: So Starlink is an amazing offering for people in those situations.

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Speaker 4: And what we're seeing happening over the over the coming

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Speaker 4: years is this being rolled out direct to mobile phones

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Speaker 4: and so you can expect him to be a really

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Speaker 4: big player in this area.

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Speaker 2: Does he want to put chips in our heads?

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Speaker 4: I'm not sure he wants to put the chip in

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Speaker 4: your head, George or mine, but he does think that

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Speaker 4: He does think that there's untapped potential for the human

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Speaker 4: mind if we can be connected up with with let's

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Speaker 4: call it silicon capability. And in the near term, what

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Speaker 4: that means is that people with disabilities, paraplegics, people with

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Speaker 4: eyesight issues and so on, he can be of tremendous

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Speaker 4: help to them. That's what the work is focusing at

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Speaker 4: the moment. They will learn a lot from doing that,

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Speaker 4: and it's possible down the road that we'll be able

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Speaker 4: to augment our own knowledge through some sort of brain

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Speaker 4: computer interface. It sounds, it can sound ghastly depending on

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Speaker 4: how you think about it, turning us into cyborgs. He

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Speaker 4: actually has a different way of thinking about it, which is,

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Speaker 4: we're going to be facing a extremely powerful AI and

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Speaker 4: we need to try and keep up with that, and

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Speaker 4: actually the best way of keeping.

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Speaker 3: Up with it is using AI.

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Speaker 4: So he actually he thinks we've been cyborgs for a

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Speaker 4: long time, ever since we started using mobile phones, especially

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Speaker 4: these smartphones, and so he has a different envisioning of

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Speaker 4: it where it's actually to help us.

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Speaker 2: Does any line must believe that Charles that we may

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Speaker 2: be living in a digital universe.

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Speaker 3: He believes that we maybe.

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Speaker 4: I think it's I think most people agree that we

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Speaker 4: may be. More controversially, he said that it's very likely

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Speaker 4: that we are. And yet and yet he hopes that

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Speaker 4: we're not, and he plans that we're not. So the

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Speaker 4: reason he thinks that we likely are, and this goes

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Speaker 4: back to the formulation of the idea by Nick Bostrom

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Speaker 4: and others, is that there may be ancestor alien civilizations

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Speaker 4: out there which have so advanced technology that they have

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Speaker 4: created simulations. And let's be honest, if you create one,

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Speaker 4: you might create thousands, millions, even billions. So that's a

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Speaker 4: lot of potential simulations in the world. On the other hand,

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Speaker 4: it may be the case that alien civilizations never got

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Speaker 4: to technological.

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Speaker 3: Level where they could do that, or if they did.

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Speaker 4: Somehow they went extinct, maybe they destroyed each other, and

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Speaker 4: so in that scenario, maybe there are probably fewer civilizations

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Speaker 4: out there than simulations. And that's why he thinks we're

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Speaker 4: probably not in a bas reality. And people when he

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Speaker 4: said that some years back, people jumped on it as

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Speaker 4: though he had a sort of horrible view of the world,

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Speaker 4: but he actually says, no, we need to assume that

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Speaker 4: we are based reality. And it's particularly important because, as

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Speaker 4: I said earlier, maybe other alien civilizations have destroyed themselves

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Speaker 4: and we should learn from that. Maybe they fail to

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Speaker 4: get through a great filter. Perhaps it's AI, perhaps it's

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Speaker 4: something else, and we need to really think carefully about

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Speaker 4: how we can avoid making the mistakes that they did.

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Speaker 2: Do we know?

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Speaker 4: And then of course I would just add on, since

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Speaker 4: we're talking about simulations, you know, does have this sense

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Speaker 4: of the absurd.

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Speaker 3: He does imagine.

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Speaker 4: He loves to talk about, saying things like Fate loves irony.

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Speaker 4: He loves to imagine that there might be God's up

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Speaker 4: there controlling.

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Speaker 3: What we do.

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Speaker 4: And this feeds this sort of zany sense of humor

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Speaker 4: he has. And so obviously the idea that we're living

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Speaker 4: in a video game made by someone else appeals to him.

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Speaker 4: But on a more serious level, I think it informs

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Speaker 4: a little bit how he thinks about AI and how

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Speaker 4: that might be developed. Because if AI is going to

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Speaker 4: be so important, I like one of these civilizations that

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Speaker 4: created simulations.

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Speaker 3: Mus says, we need to make sure that.

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Speaker 4: We remain of interest to them, because they're only going

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Speaker 4: to keep us around and they find us interesting. He

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Speaker 4: likes to say, simulations only run about things that you

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Speaker 4: where you don't know what's going to happen, and as

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Speaker 4: soon as they've become predictable or boring, you might turn

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Speaker 4: them off. So he says, yeah, we have to make

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Speaker 4: sure that AI is curious, because if it's curious, then

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Speaker 4: it will be curious about us, and therefore it's more

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Speaker 4: likely to be nice to us.

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Speaker 2: Charles was he raised with spirituality.

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Speaker 4: So he was exposed to a lot of religions growing up.

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Speaker 4: I believe his father is a committed Christian of some description.

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Speaker 3: He struggled to.

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Speaker 4: Leave in the supernatural, which which may be a disappointment

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Speaker 4: to some of your kind of later listeners, but he

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Speaker 4: just has this. His religion is the scientific method, and

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Speaker 4: he thinks that if you cannot test something, if you

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Speaker 4: cannot criticize it or prove that it's wrong, then it's

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Speaker 4: better to live with uncertainty and doubt, something that the

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Speaker 4: physicist Richard Feinman said. So spirituality is not something that

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Speaker 4: has been central to his life.

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