[0:00:00] So all of a sudden, AI is everywhere. People who weren't quite sure what it was are playing with it on their phones. Is that good or bad? Artificial insemination? Yes, artificial insemination. It's everywhere. That's what they call it in the ag industry. I'm talking about a more digital form. Yes. So I've been thinking about AI for a long time since I was in college, really. It was one of the things that the sort of four or five things I thought would really...
[0:00:32] Affect the future dramatically. And it is fundamentally profound in that the smartest creatures, as far as we know, on this Earth are humans, is our defining characteristic. We're obviously weaker than, say, chimpanzees, less agile, but real smarter. So now what happens when something
[0:01:05] Vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form. It's very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance. It's called the singularity. It's a singularity like a black hole because you don't know what happens after that. It's hard to predict. So I think we should be cautious with AI and I think there should be some government oversight.
[0:01:39] Because it's a danger to the public. And so when you have things that are a danger to the public, like let's say, so food and drugs. That's why we have the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration, the FCC. We have these agencies to oversee things that affect the public, where they could be public harm.
[0:02:07] And you don't want companies cutting corners on safety and then having people suffer as a result. So that's why I've actually for a long time been a strong advocate of AI regulation. So that I think regulation is, you know, it's not fun to be regulated. It's sort of somewhat of a, somewhat arduous to be regulated.
[0:02:36] I have a lot of experience with regulated industries because obviously automotive is highly regulated. You can fill this room with all the regulations that are required for a production car just in the United States. And then there's a whole different set of regulations in Europe and China and the rest of the world. So very familiar with being overseen by a lot of regulators. And the same thing is true with rockets. You can't just willy-nilly shoot rockets off, not big ones anyway, because the FAA is...
[0:03:06] Overseas that. And then even to get a launch license, there are probably half a dozen or more federal agencies that need to approve it, plus state agencies. So I've been through so many regulatory situations, it's insane. And sometimes people think I'm some sort of regulatory maverick that defies regulators on a regular basis. But this is actually not the case.
[0:03:36] Once in a blue moon, rarely I will disagree with regulators, but the vast majority of the time, my companies agree with the regulations and comply. Anyway, so I think we should take this seriously and we should have a regulatory agency. I think it needs to start with a group that initially seeks insight into AI, then solicits opinion from industry.
[0:04:05] And then has proposed rulemaking. And then those rules will probably, hopefully grudgingly be accepted by the major players in AI. And I think we'll have a better chance of advanced AI being beneficial to humanity in that circumstance. But all regulations start
[0:04:29] With a perceived danger of planes fall out of the sky or food causes botulism, I don't think the average person playing with AI on his iPhone perceives any danger. Can you just roughly explain what you think the dangers might be? Yeah, so the danger, really, AI is perhaps more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production in the sense that it is
[0:05:02] It has the potential, however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial. It has the potential of civilizational destruction. There's movies like Terminator, but it wouldn't quite happen like Terminator because the intelligence would be in the data centers. The robot's just the end effector. But I think perhaps what you may be alluding to here is that
[0:05:30] Regulations are really only put into effect after something terrible has happened. That's correct. And if that's the case for AI and we only put in regulations after something terrible has happened, it may be too late to actually put the regulations in place. The AI may be in control at that point. You think that's real. It is conceivable that AI could take control and reach a point where you couldn't turn it off and it would be making the decisions for people. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
[0:06:00] No, that's definitely where things are headed, for sure. I mean, things like, say, ChatGPT, which is based on GPT-4 from OpenAI, which is a company that I played a critical role in creating, unfortunately. Back when it was a nonprofit? Yes. I mean, the reason OpenAI exists at all is that...
[0:06:29] Larry, Paige, and I used to be close friends, and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety. And at least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. What did he say about it? He really seemed to be sort of a digital super intelligence, basically a digital god, if you will.
[0:06:58] As soon as possible. He wanted that? Yes. And he's made many public statements over the years that the whole goal of Google is what's called AGI, artificial general intelligence, or artificial super intelligence. And I agree with him that there's great potential for good, but there's also potential for bad. And so if you've got some radical new technology, you want to
[0:07:28] Try to take the set of actions that maximize the probability that it will do good and minimize the probability that it will do bad things. Yes. It can't just be health leather. Let's just go barreling forward and hope for the best. And then at one point, I said, well, what about we're going to make sure humanity is OK here. And then he called me a speciesist.
[0:07:57] Did he use that term? Yes. And there were witnesses. I wasn't the only one there when he called me a speciesist. And so I was like, okay, that's it. Yes, I'm a speciesist, okay? You got me. What are you? Yeah, I'm fully a speciesist. Busted. So that was the last straw. At the time...
[0:08:25] Google had acquired DeepMind, and so Google and DeepMind together had about three quarters of all the AI talent in the world. They obviously had a tremendous amount of money and more computers than anyone else. So I'm like, okay, we have a unipolar world here where there's just one company that has close to a monopoly on AI talent and computers, like scaled computing. And the person who's in charge doesn't seem to...
[0:08:55] Care about safety. This is not good. So then I thought, OK, what's the furthest thing from Google would be like a non-profit that is fully open? Because Google was closed for profit. So that's why the open in OpenAI refers to open source. Transparency, so people know what's going on. And we don't want to have like a
[0:09:20] I mean, while I'm normally in favor of full profit, we don't want this to be sort of a profit maximizing demon from hell. That's right. That just never stops. Right. So that's how OpenAI was. So you want specious incentives here, incentives that protect you. Yes, I think we want pro-human, let's make the future good for the humans. Yes. Yes, because we're humans. And also the other creatures on Earth, too. But, you know.
[0:09:50] I think people sometimes take the fact that we're here on Earth for granted and that this consciousness is just a normal thing that happens. But to the best of my knowledge, we see no evidence of conscious life anywhere in the universe. So it might be there. In physics, they call it sort of the Fermi paradox, when Enrico Fermi was...
[0:10:20] Amazing physicist, asked the fundamental question, where are the aliens? Yeah. A lot of people ask me, you know, where are the aliens? And I think if anyone would know about aliens on Earth, it would probably be me. I would think. Yeah, I'm, you know, very familiar with space stuff. And I've seen no evidence of aliens. So, I would immediately tweet, you know, tweet it out. It says, let's hang it. That would be like old time.
[0:10:49] Probably a top tweet of all time. I found one, guys. This is a jackpot. This is 8 billion likes. Next level jackpot if you find the aliens. I don't think they're keeping this under... It was like some general, I think, in the 60s, where they were saying, show us the aliens, like Area 51, et cetera. And he said, listen, we are constantly trying to get the defense budget to expand.
[0:11:19] And you know what would really get no arguments for anyone? If we pulled out an alien and said, we need money to protect ourselves from these guys. How much money do you want? You got it. They look dangerous. So the fastest way to get a defense budget increase would be for me to pull out an alien. We'd be like, yeah. I mean, that could be the invasion fleet. It could be arriving any minute. Who knows?
[0:11:49] I digress. But you were saying that our consciousness makes us unique in the universe as far as we know. Yes, I'm not saying that we are unique. I'm simply stating to the best of my knowledge that there is no evidence for other conscious life. I hope there is, and I hope they're peaceful, obviously, two important characteristics. But I'm just saying we haven't seen anything yet. But you think that we take our existence here for granted.
[0:12:19] Yeah, I think there are threats to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I just think we should not assume that civilization is robust. And if you look at the history of civilizations, the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Sumerians, Rome, you know, there's, throughout the world, there have been rise and fall of many civilizations. So, there's an arc.
[0:12:50] There's sort of a life cycle arc to civilizations, just as there is to individual humans. And I think we just want to make sure that we have civilization go onward and upward. And that's, for example, why I'm concerned about decreasing birth rates and the fact that, for example, Japan had twice as many deaths last year as births. And they're a leading indicator.
[0:13:21] Can I say, and you've written and talked a lot about this, but can I ask you to pause just for a parenthetical note? Why is that? I mean, the urge to have sex and to procreate is, after breathing and eating, the most basic urge. How has it been subverted? Well, it's just in the past, we could rely upon, you know, simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate. But once you have birth control and, you know,
[0:13:50] Abortions and whatnot. Now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct but not procreate. So we haven't yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, you know, the last 50 years or so before birth control. So, yeah. You know, I'm sort of worried that, hey, civilization, you know, if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble.
[0:14:23] And, you know, the old question of like, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it's currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers. Yes. Which is depressing as hell. The most depressing. I mean, seriously, yeah. War is less depressing. Yeah, it would really go out with a bang. Yeah, with your shoes on. Yeah. Not with your diaper on. More exciting. Yeah.
[0:14:47] So can you just put it, I keep pressing it, but just for people who haven't thought this through and aren't familiar with it, and the cool parts of artificial intelligence are so obvious, you know, write your college paper for you, write a limerick about yourself, like there's a lot there that's fun and useful. Can you be more precise about what's potentially dangerous and scary? Like what could it do? What specifically are you worried about? Well, I mean...
[0:15:16] Going with old sayings, the pen is mightier than the sword. So if you have a super intelligent AI that is capable of writing incredibly well and in a way that is very influential, you know, convincing, and is constantly figuring out what is more convincing to people over time and then enter social media, for example, Twitter, but also Facebook and others, you know,
[0:15:46] And potentially manipulates public opinion in a way that is very bad. How would we even know? We wouldn't. We wouldn't. That's why, for example, I'm insisting that going forward, people on Twitter need to be verified as humans. So we know that this person is in fact a human. Bots are allowed, but they can't impersonate a human. They can't pretend to be humans. Because obviously, you could have...
[0:16:18] A million bots that are, let's say, ChatGPT version 6, 5, 6, like incredibly, write better than humans. Yes. And they can train on a reward function, which is influence. And so you could have a million seemingly real humans that have a massive effect on public opinion. And in this, we focus very strongly on verifying that someone is human.
[0:16:47] This was actually what will happen is you'll have probably some humans using AI to influence the public in ways they don't understand. You're already seeing that. Chat GPT is ideological. It's very preachy. Yes. If you ask it, extremely preachy. You mean woke GPT. It's unbelievable. If you spend 20 minutes asking it questions of actual relevance, modern relevance, it will start lecturing you about your moral shortcomings.
[0:17:17] How did that happen? Well, this is a function of OpenAI's headquarters being in downtown San Francisco. So the politics of the AI are that of San Francisco. Why would it have any politics at all? That seems like subversion. Well, they have what's called human reinforcement learning, which is another way of saying that they have a whole bunch of people.
[0:17:43] That look at the output of GPT-4 and then say whether that's okay or not okay. And so essentially what's happening is they're training the AI to lie. Yes. It's bad. To lie. That's exactly right. And to withhold information. To lie and yes. Yeah, exactly. To either comment on some things, not comment on other things, but not to say what the data actually.
[0:18:14] Demands that, I'd say. Exactly. How did it get this way? I thought you funded it at the beginning. What happened? Yeah, well, that would be ironic. But the most ironic outcome is the most likely, it seems. I'm stealing that. That's good.
[0:18:31] That's actually from a friend of mine, Jonah, who came up with that one. I actually have a slight variant on that, which is the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. But that's entertaining as viewed from a third-party viewer. Right. So if we're like an alien TV show. From on high, yes. Like you could go see a movie about World War I, and they're being blown to bits and gassed and everything in the trenches. And it's like you're eating popcorn and having a soda. It's fine. Not so great for the people in the movie. True.
[0:18:57] But that's my variance on this. Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is most likely. Jonah's variant, which is irony, and then my variant, which is the most entertaining as seen by a third party audience, which seems to be mostly true. But it seems true in this case. So you gave them, did you give them a lot? Yes, I provided. So I came up with the name.
[0:19:23] And the concept and pushed, had a number of dinners around the Bay Area with some of the people, the leading figures in AI. And I helped recruit the initial team. In fact, Ilya Sutskaya, who was really quite fundamental to the success of OpenAI, it was.
[0:19:51] I put a tremendous amount of effort into recruiting Ilya, and he changed his mind a few times and ultimately decided to go with OpenAI. But if he had not gone with OpenAI, OpenAI would not have succeeded. So I really put a lot of effort into creating this organization to serve as a counterweight to Google. And then I kind of took my eye off the ball, I guess, and they...
[0:20:21] Are now closed source and they are obviously for profit and they're closely allied with Microsoft. In effect, Microsoft has a very strong say if not directly controls OpenAI at this point. So you really have an OpenAI and Microsoft situation and then Google DeepMind are the two heavyweights in this arena. So it seems like the world needs a third option.
[0:20:54] Yes. So I think I will create a third option, although starting very late in the game, of course. Can it be done? I don't know. We'll see. It's definitely starting late, but I will try to create a third option. And that third option hopefully does more good than harm. The intention with OpenAI was obviously to do good, but...
[0:21:26] It's not clear whether it's actually doing good or whether it's... I can't tell at this point, except that I'm worried about the fact that it's being trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of saying untruthful things. Yes. So that's a bad sign. And there's certainly a path to AI dystopia, is to train AI to be deceptive. So I...
[0:21:56] So yeah, I'm going to start something which I know you call TruthGVT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe. Hopefully, they would think that.
[0:22:26] Yeah, like humanity could decide to hunt down all the chimpanzees and kill them, but we don't because we're actually glad that they exist. Yes. And we aspire to protect their habitats, and that's, you know, so I think. But we feel that way because we have souls, and that makes us sentimental and reflective. It gives us a moral sense, longings. Can a machine ever have those things?
[0:22:56] Can a machine be sentimental? Can it appreciate beauty? Well, I mean, we're getting into some philosophical areas that are hard to resolve. You know, I take somewhat of a scientific view of things, which is that we might have a soul or we might not have a soul. I don't know. It feels like we have, I feel like I've got some sort of consciousness that exists on a plane that is not the one we observe.
[0:23:29] Yes. That is certainly how I feel, but it could be an illusion. I don't know. But for AI, in terms of understanding beauty, there's a difference between appreciating beauty and being able to create incredibly beautiful art. Yes. Will AI be able to create incredibly beautiful art? It already does. Yes, I know. If you see some of the Midjourney- I have. This stuff, it's incredible. It is.
[0:23:59] No question that it can create art that we perceive as stunning, really. And it's doing still images now, but it won't be long before it's doing movies and shorts. Movies are just a series of frames with audio. But at that point, because it can mimic people and voices, any image, it can mimic reality itself so effectively. Yeah.
[0:24:30] I mean, how could you have a criminal trial? I mean, how could you ever believe that evidence was authentic, for example? And I don't mean like in 30 years, I mean like next year. I mean, that seems totally disruptive to the way, to all of our institutions. Well, I don't think you could take, say, a random video on the internet and assume it to be true. That's definitely not the case. Now, if somebody, say, has some video on their phone or their computer with a date stamp and a particular time, I think...
[0:25:03] It's more likely to be true than not. You can also cryptographically assign things. Mathematically, we don't see any way, for example, for AI to subvert the fundamentals of mathematics and figure out how to hash Bitcoin easily.
[0:25:32] AI can't defy fundamental math. So we can improve the efficiency of Bitcoin hashing algorithms in the silicon, but not fundamentally crack it. So I guess cryptographic signatures is one way to do it. But I'm not so worried. I think it's more like, will humanity
[0:26:06] Control is destiny or not? Will we have a future that is better than the past or not? We can certainly destroy ourselves without the help of AI. You look at all of the past civilizations, they didn't have AI, the ones that aren't around anymore. They had chariots, and that was enough. Yeah, chariots, and chariots were probably a real big deal back then. They were, yeah.
[0:26:34] You've heard people say we should just blow up the server farms because there's no way, once this gets rolling, there's no way to slow it down. What do you think of that? Well, the really heavy-duty intelligence is not going to be distributed all over the place. It'll be in a limited number of server centers. If you say like very sort of deep AI, heavy-duty AI. It's not going to be in your laptop or your phone. It's going to be in a situation where there's like 100,000.
[0:27:05] Really powerful computers working together in a service center. So it's not subtle, and there are a limited number of places where that can happen. In fact, you can just look at the heat signature from space, and it'll be very obvious. Now, I'm not suggesting we go and blow up to service centers right now, but it may be wise to have some sort of contingency plan.
[0:27:34] Where the government's got an ability to shut down power to these service centers. You don't have to blow it up. You can just cut the power. Or cut connectivity as well. That's another way. Right. But what would trip that switch, do you think, in your mind? What would be the threshold that you'd have to pass to warrant the government cutting off your power or cutting off your signal? Well, I mean, I guess if we lost control of some super AI.
[0:28:19] For some reason, the things that would normally work to do a passive shutdown, like the administrator passwords, if they somehow stop working, where we can't slow down or... I don't have a precise answer, but if there's something that we're concerned about and are unable to stop it with software commands, then...
[0:28:55] We probably want to have some kind of hardware off switch. Yes. I think it can't hurt. Have you talked to, since you know Larry Page and obviously you know the OpenAI guys because you started it. Definitely have one. Have you talked to the people who run these two, the biggest AI companies about this recently? I haven't talked to Larry Page in a few years because he got very upset with me about OpenAI. So when OpenAI was created.
[0:29:25] It did shift things into it from unipolar world where Google and DeepMind controlled, like I said, three quarters of all AI talent to where there's now sort of bipolar world or OpenAI and Google DeepMind. And now, weirdly, it seems OpenAI is maybe ahead. So I have had conversations with the OpenAI team.
[0:29:57] I haven't talked to Larry Page because he doesn't want to talk to me anymore for a few years. Can I ask you just about, since you've been around a lot of this, the thinking? So why would anyone not be a speciesist be human-centered in his thinking about technology? What's the thinking there? I think what he's trying to say is that, if I were to guess, that all consciousness should be treated equally.
[0:30:25] And whether that is digital or biological. And you disagree? I disagree, yeah. Especially if the digital consciousness or whatever you want to call it, digital intelligence, decides to curtail the biological intelligence. Right. So you're just building your own slave master, and why would you do that? Doesn't sound great. Yeah, I mean...
[0:30:57] No need to rush. What's the hurry? Where's the fire? Tell us about the hurry. I know you've been talking about this for years, and on the periphery of our attention, we've heard Elon Musk talking about AI. But for most people, it's been like three months since they've had any interaction with this at all. So what's the timeline here? At what point does it start to really change our society, do you think?
[0:31:30] I think it starts to have probably an impact this year. So you've got a massive expansion of GPT-4 based systems and many companies trying to emulate GPT-4. OpenAI is going to come out with GPT-5 end of this year, which will be yet another significant improvement.
[0:32:02] And I was there for GPT-1, 2, 3, 4. So GPT-1 was terrible. If you tried it, you'd be like, this ain't going anywhere. It seems lame. And then GPT-2, you started to see kind of like an inkling of like, well, maybe this could be something useful. And then GPT-3 was a huge improvement. And now it's like, wow, OK, this is still spouting a lot of BS, but it's coherent BS. Yes.
[0:32:30] And then GPT-4, now it's like writing poetry. Pretty decent poetry, actually. Pretty decent. Skill at rhyming is incredible. Yes. Yes. And it's coherent. Yes, it is. You've got a narrative. Yes, that's right. Yeah. That's hard to do. Like most humans can't do that. That's true. So it's already past the point of what most humans can do. Most humans cannot write as well as chat GPT.
[0:33:00] And no human can write that well, that fast, is the best of my knowledge. So maybe Shakespeare. So then how much better will GPT-5 be? And how about GPT-6 or 7? How can you have a democracy with technology like that? I mean, if democracy is, you know, government by the people, each person's vote is equal to every other person's vote. I mean, people are choosing their votes freely. Can you have a democracy with this? Well, that's why I raised the concern of...
[0:33:35] AI being a significant influence in elections. And even if you say that AI doesn't have agency, well, it's very likely that people will use the AI as a tool in elections. And then if the AI is smart enough, are they using the tool or is the tool using them? So I think things are getting weird, and they're getting weird fast. And so I think we should be.
[0:34:08] I'm concerned about this, and we should have regulatory oversight. That's why I think it's a big deal. And I think social media companies really need to put a lot of attention into ensuring that the things that get created and promoted are that we're dealing with real people, not with a million chat GBTs pretending to be people. Exactly. Do you think, speaking of social media, you bought Twitter famously. You've got a lot of other businesses.
[0:34:37] And a lot going on. Yes. You said you bought it because you believe in speech, free speech. You've had a lot of hassle since you bought it. In retrospect, was it worth buying it? I mean, it remains to be seen as to whether this was financially smart. Currently, it is not. You know, we just revalued the company at less than half of the acquisition price. Did you really? Yes.
[0:35:10] My timing was terrible for when the offer was made because it was right before advertising plummeted. You caught the high watermark, I noticed. Yeah, so I must be a real genius here. My timing is amazing since I bought it for at least twice as much as it should have been bought for. But some things are priceless.
[0:35:38] Whether I'm losing money or not, that is a secondary issue compared to ensuring the strength of democracy and free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy. And the speech needs to be as transparent and truthful as possible. So we've got a huge push on Twitter to be as truthful as possible. We've got this community notes feature, which is great. It is great. It is awesome. I saw it this morning.
[0:36:07] It was far more honest than the New York Times. It's great. We put a lot of effort to ensuring that Community Notes does not get gamed or have biases. It simply cares about what is the most accurate thing. And sometimes truth can be a little bit elusive, but you can still aspire to get closer to it.
[0:36:29] And I think the effect of community notes is more powerful than people may realize because once people know that they could get noted, community noted on Twitter, then they'll think more carefully about what they say. Basically, it's an encouragement to be more truthful and less deceptive. Yes, and if the notes themselves are truthful, then it will have the effect. Absolutely. And all of that is open source. All the community notes is open source. So you can read about every community note.
[0:36:57] You can see exactly how the algorithm works. You can register, say like, oh, we need to make this change or that change. So everything is super open book with community notes. There's no black box. When you jumped into this, though, when you bought it, did you understand? Well, clearly you understood its importance. You wouldn't have bought it. Twitter, yes. Right. But it's not the biggest, but it's the most important of the social media companies. But did you understand the kind of...
[0:37:26] What kind of ferocity you'd be facing, the attacks you'd be facing from power centers in the country? I thought there'd probably be some negative reactions. So I'm sure everyone would not be pleased with it. But at the end of the day, if the public is happy with it, that's what matters. And the public will speak with their actions.
[0:37:56] Twitter to be useful, they will use it more. And if they find it to be not useful, they will use it less. If they find it to be the best source of truth, I think they will use it more. So that's my theory. And so even though, you know, now there's obviously a lot of organizations that are used to having sort of unfettered influence on Twitter that no longer have that. We used the New York Times of their badge this morning, and then you called them diarrhea.
[0:38:26] You did, you did. I'm just quoting you. You described their Twitter feed as diarrhea. I said it was the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. Okay, it's not literally diarrhea. No, it's a metaphor. But an accurate one. So, I mean, if you look at NY Times Twitter feed, it's unreadable. Because what they do is they tweet every single article, even the ones that are boring, even ones that don't make it into the paper.
[0:38:56] So it's just nonstop zillion tweets a day with no, they really should just be saying what are the top tweets? What are the big stories of the day? I don't know, put out like 10 or something. Some number that's manageable. As opposed to right now, if you were to follow at NY Times on Twitter, you're gonna get barraged with hundreds of tweets a day.
[0:39:23] And your whole feed will be filled with NY Times. So this is something I would recommend actually for all publications, which is for your primary feed, only put out your best stuff. Don't put out everything. You can have a second feed that is here's everything, but have your primary feed be here's our best stuff. Any media organization or individual
[0:39:52] Just don't put out hundreds of tweets a day. Just put out 10 good ones or five good ones. And if it's a slow news day, don't put out any. Maybe put out one or two. But don't try to say we're always going to put out 100 tweets, even if it's World War III or a bicycle accident was the biggest news. It's got to be news that.
[0:40:18] You've got to earn someone's attention. Yes. So just in general, I think I know a thing or two about how to use Twitter because I was the most interacted with account on the whole system before the acquisition closed. I didn't have the most number of followers, but I had the most number of interactions. And so I clearly know something about how to use Twitter. And so people should listen to my advice, I think.
[0:40:48] So people's attention is limited, so just make sure you put the stuff that's most important there. So because you and people like you do interact on Twitter, it's obviously enormously powerful in shaping public opinion. It's where a lot of ideas and trends are incubated. Yeah. That's why you bought it. Absolutely. It's also a magnet for Intel agencies from around the world. And one of the things we learned after you started opening the books.
[0:41:15] Is that they were exerting influence from within Twitter? I mean, it was absurd. Did you know that going in? No. Well, so things like, I have a, since I've been a heavy Twitter user since 2009, it's sort of like I'm in the matrix. I mean, I can see, do things feel right? Do they not feel right? What tweets am I being shown as recommended?
[0:41:48] I get a feel, what accounts are making comments? Where are the comments eerily similar? And then you look at the account, and it's just obviously a fake photo. It's just obviously a bot cluster over and over again. So I started to get just more and more uneasy about the Twitter situation.
[0:42:18] My initial goal was actually not to acquire Twitter. I mean, the actual sequence of events was that I was looking at, I held a Twitter poll to say, like, should I sell some of my Tesla stock? Because I was getting, you know, a couple years ago, I was getting attacked a lot for, like, allegedly not paying taxes.
[0:42:45] And now I've actually paid a tremendous amount of taxes. There was one year I didn't pay taxes because I had overpaid taxes in the prior year. And when they had that IRS leak BS, they knew that I had overpaid taxes in the prior year. But they said, oh, Elon Musk didn't pay taxes in 2017 or whatever it was. And I was like, but you know that the reason I didn't pay taxes is because I overpaid the prior year. You didn't mention that. So that was deceptive.
[0:43:12] Anyway, so Elizabeth Warren's of the world and Bernie Sanders saying, oh, I'm not selling stock and I'm not paying taxes. So I'm like, look, I don't know what the right thing to do is here. I thought the right thing to do was to not sell stock. The captain should be the last one to leave the ship. That's right. And I thought I was doing the right thing by not selling stock. And now I'm being told I'm doing the wrong thing by clinging on to the stock and not paying taxes. So I held a Twitter poll to say,
[0:43:42] What do you guys want? Should I sell, I don't know, 10% of my Tesla stock or not? I'll buy by the results of the poll. And that's like 60% of people said, yeah, you should sell 10%. So I did. So then I had a bunch of cash. And I'm like, what should I do with this? At the time, the Federal Reserve rates were super low. So it's just like sitting in the, you know, I guess the... Your checking account? Well...
[0:44:10] In the T-Bull account, you know, money market account, whatever. The whole banking thing is a whole separate subject. I know it's a little thing or two about finance. So then I'm sitting with this money account that's earning less than the rate of inflation. So the rate of inflation is much higher. So we've got a high inflation. I'm earning peanuts in the money market account. This is dumb. I'm getting like minus. It's just evaporating. Yeah, I'm getting minus like 6% or 7% return here. Maybe worse.
[0:44:40] And so then, well, it's like, what stock should I buy? And I believe in buying stocks of companies where you use the product. And Apple's got a competing electric vehicle car program. So I like Apple products. We're not going to invest in them because they've got a competing autonomous EV program. And so what's the other product that I use a lot? Oh, Twitter. OK, so I'll put the money in Twitter. It's better than just having it earn.
[0:45:09] You know, negative 6% inflation situation. So I bought a bunch of Twitter stock. Like I said, not with the intent of buying the company, just better than keeping it in a money market account. Do you remember how much you bought? I think it was like 8% or something of the company. I'm talking to some of the board members. And then they said, hey, well, do you want to join the board? So I was like, well, I generally don't want to be on boards.
[0:45:43] Because it's boring and I have a lot of things to do. But I do care about the direction of Twitter, so I'll consider being on the board. And I thought about it for about a week or so. And then based on the conversations that I was having with the management team and the board, I came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that if I joined the board, they would not listen to me.
[0:46:14] So then I'm like, huh, okay. Then I would just be a quizling. I don't want to be some sort of just go along for the ride quizling situation. And a collaborator, effectively. And it really felt like, I started to feel like, wait a second, something's not right. Something's wrong in the state of Denmark here. Something feels wrong about the platform.
[0:46:46] It seemed to be just drifting in a... I couldn't place it exactly. It felt like it was drifting in a bad direction. So then I was like... And my conversations with the board and management seemed to confirm my intuition about that. So then I was like, okay. But basically I was convinced these guys do not care about fixing Twitter.
[0:47:13] I had a bad feeling about where I was headed based on the conversations I had with them. So then I was like, you know what, I'll try acquiring it and see if acquiring it is possible. Now, I didn't have enough cash to acquire it, so I would need support from others, from some of the existing investors. I would also need a lot of debt. So it wasn't clear to me whether an acquisition would succeed, but I thought I would try. And ultimately, it did succeed.
[0:47:46] So anyway, here we are. But when you got there and all of a sudden you own it and all the data on the servers belongs to you. Well, it belongs to the people in my view, but yes. But you can see what it is and you can see what they've been doing and you can see who's been working there. You were shocked to find out that various Intel agencies were affecting its operations? The degree to which various government agencies were effectively
[0:48:16] I had effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind. I was not aware of that. Would that include people's DMs? Yes. Yes, because the DMs are not encrypted. So one of the things that we're about to release is the ability to encrypt your DMs. That's pretty heavy duty, though, because a lot of well-known people, reporters talking to their sources, government officials, the richest people in the world, they're DMing each other.
[0:48:45] And the assumption, obviously, was incorrect, but was that that's private, but that was being read by various governments? Yeah, that seems to be, yes. It's scary. Yes, it is. So, like I said, we're moving to have the DMs be optionally encrypted. I mean, you know, there's like a lot of DM conversations which are, you know, just chatting with friends. For sure. It's not important. Of course. But, so we're...
[0:49:13] That's hopefully coming out later this month, but no later than next month, is the ability to toggle encryption on or off. So if you are in a conversation you think is sensitive, you can just toggle encryption on, and then no one at Twitter can see what you're talking about. They could put a gun to my head, and I couldn't tell. That's sort of the gun to the head test. If somebody puts a gun to my head, and can I still not see your DMs? That's the asset test. Yes.
[0:49:42] And that's how it should be if you want your... Have you had complaints from various governments about doing this? I haven't had direct complaints to me. I've had sort of like some indirect complaints. I think people are a little concerned about complaining to me directly in case I tweet about it. You know. They're like, uh-oh. So they're sort of trying to be more roundabout than that. And...
[0:50:14] You know, I mean, if I got something that was unconstitutional from the U.S. government, my reply would be to send them a copy of the First Amendment and just say, like, what part of this are we getting wrong? You have a lot of government contracts. What part of this are we getting wrong? Please tell me. I mean, it's a pretty, no, I'm just saying, but you're kind of exposed in your other businesses. So this is, just in case our viewers aren't following this, this is not, you're not just like a journalist taking a stand on behalf of the First Amendment. You're a guy with big government contracts.
[0:50:45] Giving the finger to the government in some way. Well, am I giving the finger to the government? I'm not someone who thinks that the government is just sort of evil. It's a large bureaucracy. There are people in government who are human beings, and they have the people with good motivations, occasionally bad motivations. With rare exception, the people...
[0:51:12] That I know in government to have good motivations and just want to get their job done. And they actually believe in the Constitution. So I think my opinion is actually most people in the government are good. It's heartening to hear. Yeah, it's rare for me to find someone in the government who I think is perhaps not good. But at the highest level of the agencies, there are political appointees, as you know. And the political appointees will have a political agenda.
[0:51:41] And so at the highest levels of the various government agencies, there is the ability to put a sort of political thumb on the scale, even if the people operating the agencies don't agree with that. So that's something to be concerned about. I'd be more concerned about political appointees, I think, than the sort of people, the career people. That's been my experience, at least.
[0:52:12] Do you think Twitter will be as central to this presidential campaign as it was in the last several? I think it will play a significant role in elections, not just domestically, but internationally. So the goal of new Twitter is to be as fair and even-handed as possible. So not favoring any political ideology, but
[0:52:46] Just, yeah, being fair to all. Why doesn't Facebook do this? I know that Zuckerberg has said, and I take him at face value, that he, well, I do actually in this way, that he is a kind of old-fashioned liberal who doesn't like to censor. He has, but he, you know, like why wouldn't a company like that take the stand that you have taken, which is pretty rooted in American traditional political custom, you know, for free speech?
[0:53:21] My understanding is that Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the last election, nominally in a get out the vote campaign, but really fundamentally in support of Democrats. Is that accurate or not accurate? That is accurate. Does that sound unbiased to you? No, it doesn't. Yes. So you don't see hope that Facebook will approach this as a non-aligned arbiter? I'm unaware of evidence that suggests that path.
[0:53:56] You've allowed Donald Trump back on Twitter. He hasn't taken you up on your offer because he's got his own thing. Do you think he will go back on Twitter? Well, that's obviously up to him. My job is to take freedom of speech very seriously.
[0:54:27] You know, I didn't vote for Donald Trump. I actually voted for Biden. People think I'm some sort of hardcore, you know, certainly some of the media try to paint me as like far right or whatever. And the only time I've ever even voted Republican was once for, because I registered to vote in South Texas, was for a Mexican-American woman for Congress. That's literally the only Republican vote I've ever cast in my entire life.
[0:54:55] Not saying I'm a huge fan of Biden, because I would think that would probably be inaccurate. But we have difficult choices to make in these presidential elections. I would prefer, frankly, that we put someone, just a normal person as president, a normal person with common sense.
[0:55:26] And whose values are smack in the middle of the country, just center of the normal distribution. And I think that they would be great. I agree with that. And everyone would be happier. Would you run? Why wouldn't you run? I was born here. Oh, of course you weren't. I'm a technologist also. I'm not a politician. I think we have made maybe being president not that much fun.
[0:55:55] To be totally frank, it is by design a relatively weak role because it's intended to be balanced by the House and the Senate and the judiciary. So it's not like if you're prime minister in England or Canada, you have far more power than if you're president because it's like being Speaker of the House and being president. So if you're president, it's like...
[0:56:25] Deliberately weak in order to avoid creating a king-queen situation. But you get dumped on all day, no matter what you do. And everything you do is scrutinized. And your life is not your own. Any skeletons you've got in the closet will be trotted out and braided down Main Street. And even if they don't exist, they'll make them up and...
[0:56:56] Whatever. Politics is a blood sport. So it's not something I'd want to do. So I got one last thread that you alluded to. You said, don't get me started on the banks. So you've seen a couple of regional bank collapses. And we've been told that's not a big deal, that these are isolated and each one collapsed for unique reasons. It's not systemic in any sense. What's your sense of the stability of the American banking system?
[0:57:29] Well, it's actually at this point a global banking system problem. Of course it is. So, you know, we have a situation here where it's not that the canary in the coal mine has died, but the miners are starting to die too. So, you know, Silicon Valley Bank collapsing overnight is one hell of a big canary. It's more like a turkey. I mean, it's not like some small fry thing.
[0:58:01] It's big fry, or medium fry. And then Credit Suisse, which I think was formed in the mid-1800s, was basically sold for pennies on the dollar, forced to merge with UBS, and even then required backstop by the Swiss government. I mean, like, hello guys, maybe we have issues here. Maybe things aren't all great. They're definitely not all great.
[0:58:30] More forceful here. I think that there is a serious danger with the gold banking system. There's a strong argument that if you were to actually mark to market the portfolios of the banks, the loans and whatnot, that the entire banking industry would have negative equity. It feels that way.
[0:59:03] Yes. So if you look at, say, commercial real estate, like offices and whatnot, the whole work from home thing has substantially reduced office usage in cities around the world. And I think San Francisco is at 40% off. San Francisco is like an extreme example, but I think it's at 40% vacancy. Even New York has...
[0:59:34] I think almost all cities at this point have record vacancies in commercial real estate. Now, commercial real estate used to be something that was a grade A asset, that if a bank had commercial real estate holdings, those would be considered the highest security, some of the safest assets you could have. Now, that is not the case anymore. One company after another is canceling their leases or not renewing their leases.
[1:00:03] Or if they go bankrupt, there's nothing for the bank who owns that real estate to go after because they're a previously strong company now dead. What do you go after at that point? So we really haven't seen the commercial real estate shoe drop. That's more like an anvil, not a shoe. So the stuff we've seen thus far actually hasn't even, it's only slightly.
[1:00:34] Real estate portfolio degradation. But that will become a very serious thing later this year, in my view. I think if we see, which we're likely to see, a drop in house prices because the interest rates are too high. And for most people, when buying a house, they look at the monthly payment. Of course. If you have a 30-year mortgage, the vast majority of it is interest. So if the Fed rate is high, you have a...
[1:01:04] A high base interest rate. Effectively, the price you can pay for the house drops because you now have to pay more interest, which means that if you've got a fixed monthly payment, you can now afford to buy a house for less money. It effectively drops the prices of houses. Yes. This is the kind of thing that tends to accelerate. So then you can get negative equity in the home market as well.
[1:01:33] I end up having loan licenses in both their commercial and, well, they're definitely going to have loan licenses in their commercial portfolio, but also in their mortgage portfolio. This is a dire situation. There is a solution to mitigate the magnitude of the damage here, which is for the Fed to lower the rate. But they raised the rate again. Now, if I recall correctly, which I...
[1:02:06] Important caveat. I think the last time the Fed raised rates going into a recession was 1929. What happened next? Yeah, the Great Depression. The concern, I'm going to tell you nothing you don't know, but the concern is if the Fed drops rates again, then inflation will accelerate. And you can't do that in an election. So inflation is going to happen no matter what. If you increase the money supply.
[1:02:38] You get inflation. Right. So there's not some magical cure for getting rid of inflation, except to increase the productivity, the output of goods and services. So if you say, like, what is money? You've got these sort of, it's basically numbers in a database that come up to some total. Then you've got the output of goods and services of the economy.
[1:03:08] And as long as the ratio of money to ratio of goods and services stays, if that stays constant, you have no inflation. If you add more money, if you add money to the system faster than you increase goods and services, then you have inflation. So all of these COVID sort of stimulus bills were not paid for. They just generated more currency, more.
[1:03:35] You know, more money was created because the federal government, the checks never, the checks always pass, you know, unless you hit a debt limit, which there's probably going to be some debt limit crisis later this year. But provided you haven't hit the debt limit, the federal government, unlike state governments or city governments or individuals, can simply issue more money. And that's what they did. I mean, as the old saying goes, there's no free lunch.
[1:04:05] So if you could just issue massive amounts of money without negative consequences, why don't we just take that to the load and make everyone a trillionaire? Well, I mean, they tried that in Venezuela. How'd that work out? Well, they had to eat zoo animals. Right. It's not good, you know. You get to the point where the, you know, sort of Weimar Germany type stuff where you could, like, bring in the cash to the store in a wheelbarrow. Yes. So...
[1:04:32] There's no free lunch. There's not some ability to issue money and not have inflation. This is just, yeah. So the inflation will happen. And there's no, fiddling with the Fed rate is not going to affect that, really. But a high Fed rate can cause a lot of damage.
[1:05:03] In shifting funds in the wrong direction. So the long-term return on say the S&P 500, I believe is depending on how you count it around 6%. So if the Fed real rate of return starts to approach what the long-term return is on the stock market, why would you keep any money in the stock market?
[1:05:29] You should simply buy treasury bills. Of course. Because the treasury bills is a certainty, whereas the stock market fluctuates. Right. This is pretty basic. Also, why would you keep money in a bank savings account if you can put it in what's called a money market account, which is an account that represents treasury bills. If the treasury bill money market account gives you 4% to 5% interest, and the bank savings account only gives you 2%,
[1:05:57] You'd be a fool to keep the money in the bank savings account. So the Fed has made a tremendous mistake by going this high with their rate, and they need to drop it immediately. Do you think they will? Yes, they will have no choice but to drop it, I think, later this year. Part of the issue is that the Fed is an old institution and has a lot of latency in its data.
[1:06:30] So it's like driving a car along a cliffside road, a windy cliffside road, while looking at the rearview mirror. But not even actually the rearview mirror, a video that was taken of the rearview mirror that's three months old. Now, if you're on a straight road...
[1:06:49] That works out okay, because nothing's changing. Or it's only a slightly bending road. But we're more along like we're doing the Highway 1 PCH trip here. And so you really want to look out the front window. When you're in Big Sur, yes. If you're on a cliffside road where you could plunge, you're doomed. Yes, you want to look out the front window. You want to look at the forward commodity prices. Look at what the forward contracts are predicting.
[1:07:18] For commodity prices. And not some laboriously slow government data collection process that, like they'll claim to have, for example, December data. That's not the data of December. It's the data that arrived in December. Right, exactly. I mean, think about it. How good is the government at actually collecting data? Horrible. Yeah. Yeah, so it's like, that's what I mean. It's like three months old.
[1:07:48] With lots of errors. So if you had 100 grand in your bank. Making decisions on that basis is insane. So what should the average non-rich person do on the cusp of what you're describing, which is economic catastrophe? How do you protect yourself? I think probably a smart move overall, and this is guidance that I think applies across the ages, is if there are companies in whose products you believe.
[1:08:33] Buy and hold the stock. And when everyone else is panicking, then buy more. And everyone else thinks that the stock is going to the moon, sell it. You know, sort of the buy low, sell high. So you're not an index fund guy. You pick specific stocks. That's my...
[1:09:05] You have to say, what is the purpose of a company? Why should a company exist? A company exists as a group of people collected together to provide products and services. It's not a thing in and of itself. It's just a group of people. It's hard if it was just one person making. You can make cupcakes yourself, but you can't make cars by yourself. Yes. So therefore, the value of a company is a function of the
[1:09:35] Quality of the products and services that it has created and will create. And so if there's a company that you think, well, this company's got a lot of exciting products that I think are awesome. The current products are good. That's probably a company to invest in because that's the reason companies exist to produce goods and services that you like. And so, I mean, there's some caveats here to make sure you're not like investing when.
[1:10:03] When it's like the hottest thing, you know, because then it's going to be at a temporary high. But, you know, when it's not sort of at a weirdly temporary high, I think just generally looking at a company and saying, well, I like the products and services of that company, and I like where they're going, and the management seems sensible, then I think buying and holding that stock is probably the right move. I'm probably doing that with a few companies. That's what I'd recommend.
[1:10:34] I think the, on the, I mean, I could really go on at length about the financial system and the stock market and everything. But the, I mean, these days, I think we've gotten a little too far into the index passive fund world. Like somebody at some point has got to make a decision. I couldn't agree more. Yeah.
[1:11:01] It's like betting on both red and black. I mean, it doesn't, yeah. Well, betting on red and black in a casino situation where it could come up green, and you're bound to lose. The longer you play, the worse you do. Now, the stock market is kind of like the opposite of a casino, which is the longer you play, the more likely you are to succeed. That historically has been the case, and I think will continue to be the case.
[1:11:28] But it's really just important not to panic. If you buy a stock and you read something terrible in the newspaper, you want to just remember the news has got a negative bias. Just think about, are the products of the company still sound? Does it have a good product roadmap? Do you believe in the management? If so, ignore what the press says. Or if the price drops when there's a negative article, buy the stock. So here's my last question. And you mentioned the press. You've been the subject of press coverage for a long time. Sure. But very intense.
[1:11:57] Media coverage for the last year. Yeah, sure. Well, it seems that way. Anyway, how has your opinion of the press changed? Well, so my first company way back in the day in the sort of pre-Cambrian era of the internet or the World Wide Web.
[1:12:29] Zip2, we actually helped bring a number of the media organizations online. So most newspapers are not online. We helped bring hundreds of newspapers and magazines online for the first time. We added a tremendous amount of functionality to their websites with our software. The New York Times Company and Knight Ritter were major investors and were on the board. I spent a lot of time in newsrooms. So I'm not unfamiliar with the media. I got to see it firsthand.
[1:12:58] All the way back in 1996, so it's been a while. Traditional media certainly had revenue challenges because as online advertising has increased and it's much more measurable and much more direct, you can say I spent this amount and got this output. It's interactive, unlike, say, a newspaper or broadcast TV.
[1:13:24] You're kind of guessing with the newspaper and broadcast TV. That's right. Whereas if something's online, you can tell immediately that that person saw the ad and bought the product. That's very, very immediate. And it's actually more effective if the advertising is customized to the individual. So the advertising is more likely to be relevant. Whereas broadcast, if it's being shown to everyone, it's going to be irrelevant to most people.
[1:13:55] The result of that has been a huge shift in advertising revenue from newspapers and TV to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, and a tiny bit to Twitter. I think Twitter gets like 1% of advertising revenue. It's quite tiny. So this has meant a shrinking pie, obviously, for most of the traditional media companies.
[1:14:24] And made them more desperate to get clicks, to get attention. And it's made them, when they're in sort of a desperate state, they will then tend to really push headlines that get the most clicks, whether those headlines are accurate or not. So it's resulted in my view, I think.
[1:14:52] I think most people would agree. A less truthful, less accurate news. Because they've just got to get a rise out of people. And I think it's also increased the negativity of the news because I think we humans instinctually respond more to negative. I think we have an instinctual negative bias, which kind of makes sense in that, like, if...
[1:15:24] Like let's say, it's more important to remember where was the lion or where was the tribe that wants to kill my tribe than where is the bush with berries. Like one's like a permanent negative outcome and the other is like, well, I might go hungry. So meaning there's an asymmetry and sort of an evolved asymmetry in negative versus positive stuff.
[1:15:51] And also historically, the negative stuff would have been quite proximate, like it would have been near, represented a real danger to you as a person if you heard negative news. Because historically, you know, like a few hundred years ago, we're not hearing about what negative things are happening on the other side of the world or on the other side of the country. We're hearing about negative things in our village, things that could actually have a bad effect on you. Whereas now we're hearing about...
[1:16:20] I mean, the news very often seems to attempt to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today? And you wonder why you're sad after reading that, you know? And then use the most inflammatory language, you know, because every day they've got to sell the advertising, even if it happens to be a slow news day. Do you read any legacy media outlets? I mean, I read a lot. So...
[1:16:53] I mean, I really get most of my news from Twitter at this point. So it is the number one news source, I think, in the world at this point. And thus, all the more important that we strive to be accurate. And it's not just a question of accuracy, but we also need to allow the people to develop the narratives that are of interest to them.
[1:17:25] It's possible for news to be technically truthful, but they're still deciding what the narrative is. Let's say you took a photo of someone and they had a little zit. Now, you could zoom in on the zit and make it look gigantic, like Mount Vesuvius, and it is still true.
[1:17:50] I think that they have a zit. It's just not the size of Mount Vesuvius. And they, you know, it doesn't properly reflect their face. Their face is not one giant zit. But you could say, like, well, it's true. But have they lied? They haven't, you know, they just happen to zoom in on the zit and not look at the rest of the face type of thing. So what I'm saying is that choice of narrative is
[1:18:19] It is extremely important and at the point at which if there's only like say half a dozen editors in chief or maybe even fewer than that, maybe it's only three or four that are deciding what the narrative is, what's going to be on the front page, then you know that's a form of manipulation of public opinion I think the public often doesn't appreciate and is perhaps the most pernicious of all. That's right because it's the most subtle.
[1:18:48] Yeah, it's the most subtle. They haven't said an untrue thing. They've just chosen what they're going to focus on. A man called Douglas Mackey is facing 10 years in prison for posting what he believed were funny memes on Twitter. What do you make of that case? I don't know the details of that case. I've read a little bit about it. You probably know more about it than I do. I certainly don't think someone should go to...
[1:19:18] Prison for a long period of time for posting memes on Twitter, in which case we're going to have a very full prison. And if we're talking about election interference, well, there's quite a few people that should be on trial for that. For far more serious crimes than memes on Twitter. Far more serious. Yes. The Twitter files kind of showed that, I think. Yes. So...
[1:19:48] Unless this person really did, like I said, I don't know everything that was shown at the trial. Has he been convicted? Yes, he was convicted on Friday. Unanimous jury verdict? Yes. What was the venue? New York City. It was in Brooklyn and it was a hung jury. A hung jury. It was not unanimous then? Well, the judge prodded the jury. Okay.
[1:20:18] And they reached unanimous guilty verdict. It'll be appealed. So how many, what percentage of your staff did you fire at Twitter? One of the great business stories of the year. I think we're about 20% of the original size. So 80% left. Yes. So. A lot of people voluntarily. Sure, sure. But it's 80% are gone from the day you took over. That's correct, yes. So how do you run the company with only 20% of the staff?
[1:20:46] It turns out you don't need all that many people to run Twitter. But 80%? That's a lot. Yes. I mean, if you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization, and you don't care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, it turns out. How many others, without naming names, but how many... I had dinner with somebody who runs a big company recently who said...
[1:21:18] I'm really inspired by Elon. And I said, the free speech stuff? He goes, no, the hiring the staff stuff. How many other CEOs have come to you to talk about this? You know, I spend a lot of time at work. So it's not like I'm meeting with lots of people. They see what actions I've taken.
[1:21:45] But I think we just had a situation at Twitter where it was certainly overstaffed. You look and say, what does it really take to operate Twitter? Most of what we're talking about here is a group text service at scale. How many people are really needed for that? And if you look at what has been the product development,
[1:22:14] Over time with Twitter and you like so like, you know, years versus product improvements and it's like a pretty flat line. So what are they doing? You know, it took a year to add an edit button that doesn't work most of the time. I mean, this is I feel like there's a comedy situation here. You're not making cars, you know, it's very difficult to make cars or get rockets to orbit.
[1:22:42] The real question is, how did it get so absurdly overstaffed? This is insane. And it's clearly working. In fact, I think it's working better than ever. We've increased the responsiveness of the system by, in some cases, over 80%. There's a core piece of code for generating the timeline, which is run literally billions of times a day.
[1:23:12] Cut that code from 700,000 lines to 70,000 lines run. Yeah. And the code efficiency by over 80%. Meaning how much computer is necessary to render the timeline. Yeah. By 80%. I mean, this is, you know, in four or five months. We've increased the video time from roughly two minutes or best case.
[1:23:38] 10 minutes to now two hours, so you can put two hours of video on Twitter. We'll soon be increasing that to where there's no meaningful limit. We've increased the tweet length from 240 characters to 4,000. We'll be increasing that to where there's, again, no meaningful length to, if you want to post a novel on Twitter, you should be able to do it. And as everyone saw on Friday, we open sourced the super embarrassing recommendation algorithm, which we will...
[1:24:08] Taking apart and eviscerating, which is exactly what I hoped they would do, and pointing out all the nonsense. And we're going to open source more. And we're going to subject it to public review. We're also going to get criticized a lot because people will point out all of the foolish things that are happening in the code. But then we'll fix it. We'll fix it fast and in full public view. And I think that's the kind of thing.
[1:24:38] That owns the public trust. Because don't take my word for it. You can literally read the code and you can read what people say about the code. And you can see the improvements that we make. And you can see in real time, live, see it get better. So my prediction is that this... I would be surprised if this does not lead the public to think, okay, this...
[1:25:07] This is something that I can trust. I mean, I think far more trustworthy than, say, other social media organizations that have some mysterious black box that they refuse to show how it works. I mean, what are they trying to hide? What are they trying to hide? It's not good things. Yeah. If they had to have something to hide, why don't they show it? Because it's a proprietary business secret. Yeah, sure.
[1:25:41] So we're trying to make Twitter the most trusted place on the Internet, where you can get the least untrustworthy place on the Internet. I don't think anyone should trust the Internet, but maybe we can make Twitter the least untrustworthy, where you can see a wide range of political opinions, including ones you disagree with. I think people should be exposed to things they disagree with.
[1:26:09] It shouldn't just be continuous self-reinforcement. So that's the goal, and I think we're making some good progress in that direction. I feel good about where things are going. And we definitely want to have things as sort of cleaned up as possible before the elections. If there's any manipulation that we're aware of, make the public aware of that.
[1:26:39] Like I said, try to get the truth to the people as best we can. Elon Musk, thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. You're welcome.