Well, the reason I say studying a company is like in glass and staring at the abyss is that in order to make a company successful, it requires doing a lot of painful work. Work that is not fun, working very long hours, and then maybe your company survives, maybe it does not. And the vast majority of startups fail. So that's why, you know, that's the eating glass and staring at the abyss is starting a company. Lots of hard work followed by death is usually what happens when people start companies. That's why I say if people need words of encouragement to start a company, they should not start a company.
With respect to government, there's really the challenge is overcoming bureaucracy. And I think bureaucracy is perhaps the, I say the penultimate boss battle, the ultimate boss battle is defeating entropy, which we, physics tells us we cannot defeat entropy. The second hardest battle is defeating bureaucracy. Well, you know, that's how difficult it is to improve government. Now, one of the things that's happened, which always happens with an extended period of peace time is that you have a steady increase in the amount of bureaucracy. The size of the government grows the laws and regulations that are put in place get larger every year.
So it's a sad reason that, you know, if you have regulators, regulators are going to add more regulations every year. All makers will add more laws every year. The cleansing process normally for getting rid of nonsensical laws and regulations is war. Now, obviously, we'd prefer to not have war, drive the reformation of government. So in the absence of war, you have to have something like what we have formed here in the U.S. at Department of Government Efficiency in order to get rid of laws and regulations. With laws, we have to require obviously the consent of Congress. But for regulations, this can be done at the executive branch level.
It's to reexamine the vast body of regulations and get rid of those where there's more harm than good, of which there are many. And then reducing the size of the government and then also balancing the budget so that we are not driving the country with bankruptcy. These things are all very hard. And I want to be clear, like, we may need to fail in this objective. That's why I described it as an extremely difficult battle. This has never succeeded before. So prior attempts to reduce the size of bureaucracy to make out more efficient have generally failed. Even when parties are elected for that, so if you take, say, Reagan, he's campaigned on getting rid of the federal Department of Education and having that be done at the state level. And the Department of Education at the federal level is a recent creation. It was, I think, created about 45 years ago or something like that.
So I'm going to ask you're also very familiar with the German economy and the German market. So would you recommend a department of government efficiency for Germany too? I would. I think, generally, for governments that having, you basically need to have some process for trash collection, garbage collection. So if you only have a process for creating regulations, but no process for deleting regulations, eventually everything is illegal and nothing is allowed to happen and progress comes to a grinding halt.
So it's very important, I think, that all governments have a team that's responsible for reducing the size of government and for getting rid of regulations that may have made sense at one time, but no longer make sense currently. And simplifying the process, otherwise, you get these things build up like plaque on arteries. Like you start having the flow of blood through the government get constricted with more and more buildup on the walls of the arteries. So you must have this cleansing process very important.
Well, I think President Trump likes to get things done. And he's not looking to punish countries or do things that are economically insane, but he does view tariffs as a means to gain cooperation of countries for important matters. And obviously, if countries have implemented asymmetric tariffs without taxing the import of American goods, while America does not tax the import of their goods, then we have an imbalance. So what I suspect you will see is that President Trump will be – will want to – if we'll – countries that have asymmetric tariff barriers, like it could be either tariff or regulatory barriers that – which are basically – any restraint of trade, then the President Trump will want to take action to stop the restraint or trade and ensure that there is a fair and level playing field for American companies and companies in Europe or China or wherever the case may be.
So that's my guess, my sense of it is that there needs to be – there needs to be – he's simply looking for a fair and level playing field. Yeah. Well, first of all, I think actually, Tesla would have existed without – if they have been in power, we would still have put the factory in Berlin. The – I'm generally against government incentives that distort markets, and there are – it tends to be a lot of government tariffs and incentives and penalties that distort markets. So that's – you know, now, if those things are put in place by others, then we obviously must take advantage of them or Tesla is at a competitive disadvantage. But the – you know, the reason that I am in favor of AFD is that there's some fundamental things that must happen without which – I'm concerned that Germany will fail, which is that there has to be – they have to be sensible controls on immigration. There has to be – if there are criminals in Germany who are committing crimes and hurting people in Germany, they must be deported, and that's not happening. Then there must also be freedom of speech such that the people know what the truth is, otherwise they cannot make an informed decision. So if you do not have freedom of speech, you cannot be of democracy because the public cannot make an informed decision about their vote if there is not freedom of information. So the – in Germany right now, there are draconian laws, rules against freedom of expression where even insulting a politician can get to you at present time, which is insane. So I like the fact that the AFD is in favor of freedom of speech. I like that the AFD is in favor of sensible immigration policies and deportation of criminals. And I like the generally libertarian policies of the AFD.
Well, it is obviously easy to strawman my statement, which is what he's done, to say that that we should flip from entirely a sort of – where we sort of torture young children in Germany with nothing but guilt to saying, oh, we should completely ignore the sins of Nazi Germany. I have said, obviously, neither of those things. What I have said is that we should not be torturing children in Germany and telling that Germany is the worst country in the world, and that is all they are taught, and they are taught nothing about the great things that Germany has done in the past. And that Germany cannot be defined and children whose great grandparents may not have even been Nazis are told that Germany is the worst country that has ever existed and faced the earth and they must live with nothing but guilt and shame. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is not what I'm not saying is that Nazism should be ignored. I had never said that, but I am saying that the tremendous cultural history of Germany is incredible. If you think of the great philosophers, the great composers, the incredible contributions in terms of engineering and science that Germany has made, including those of Jewish people in Germany who are Einstein, for example. These things should be celebrated. Not to the exclusion of a Nazi is not to ignore it, but not to say that this is all Germany is about, is absurd and false. And so people should be proud of the great things that Germany has done, proud of that that Germany is an ancient nation, thousands of years old, that was one of the few nations to actually resist incorporation into the Roman Empire.
You see, go back 2,000 years ago, even Rome could not defeat Germany. Rome was the most powerful empire in the world at the time, but could not defeat Germany. They gave up. So once we need to understand the full context of German history, the great things as well as the terrible things. And when you look at, say, America, what happened to the Native people of America? Where are they? What happened to the Native people of Judea before the Jewish people got there? Where are they? So at some point, things cannot be simply about terrible things that have been done. The terrible things must be learned, but also the good things. Well, I mean, this is simply, I mean, that's, you know, we're going from like deep philosophical and political issues to trivia of the week.
This is a, there are a lot of very smart, very motivated engineers in China. So you should expect that China will come up with many great things, and they have come with many great things. Again, look at the, and if one looks at the long history of China, also an ancient nation that hasn't invented and developed many things. And for most of actually human history, China has been the most powerful nation on earth. So, you know, I think particularly from, say, the possession of people in China, they simply view China's ascendancy as resuming the normal sort of place in history, which is the most powerful country on earth.
And so you can expect that they will do many great things, deep-state being one of them. But that is simply the result of the immense amount of challenge in China. It's very impressive. But it's not, is it some sort of complete revolution in AI? No, it is not. The XAI and others will soon be releasing models that are better than deep-state. Well, as you know, Europe actually has more bureaucracy than what we can guess. Okay. Connection looks good. Europe actually has more bureaucracy than the US does because you don't just have the provincial and sort of national level. You also have the EU on top of that. And we totally frank EU headquarters in Brussels is essentially a giant cathedral to bureaucracy.
So if one wishes to visit the grand cathedral of bureaucracy, visit EU headquarters in Brussels. I do think that Europe probably needs government efficiency more than the US does. And this needs to happen at the country level and at the EU level. And actually I think the job is more difficult in Europe than it is in the US. I think overregulation has inhibited a tremendous amount of progress and innovation in Europe. And I call it the slow strangulation by overregulation. I slow strangulation because it's not like at any one moment you feel like this is it. But the newness around the neck just gets a little tighter every year. And eventually it's going to kill Europe. So there must be in my opinion immediate action to reduce regulation at the EU level, at the country level and at the local level.
Well, I think we'll see that open source models generally lag the commercial models. So whatever is commercially powerful today will probably be open source in a year or less. And I expect that trend to continue. So essentially everyone will have AI. Do you see this is maybe the most profound change. You know, the advent of digital superintelligence.
Now, if you stand back and say like promise from 1000 years ago, sorry 1000 years from now, what will historians, well, assuming they're even human at that point, not computers. What will historians regard as the most important thing? Or the most important milestones in history. One of those fundamental milestones will be the advent of digital superintelligence. No question. They will long ago have forgotten who's in charge of which country. Well, that will be a minor by comparison with the advent of digital superintelligence. I think also the humanity becoming a multi-planet civilization would also fit on that list because I think that fits on the list.
I mean, I want to say like looking at from a very broad standpoint, a very high level, I could say what are the what are my milestones that would perhaps be in the top 10 from it. And from the general standpoint of evolution in general, you'd say like there would be single self-life, multi-cellular life, differentiation into plants and animals, life going from ocean to land, mammals, cognitive function in mammals, that's like humans. And also then there would be life becoming multi-planetary and digital superintelligence would fit on that. You know, essentially top 10 list.
I mean, with great difficulty, it is quite a challenge. The, you know, our brain only consumes 20 watts of power. And of that, only 10 of that half of that is higher brain function. So I've got basically a 10 watt meat computer to do all this. And I find this all to be very challenging for my 10 watt meat computer. That is my brain. One thing that I think is helpful though is there's a big difference between training. How much mental workload training to do something takes versus inference or executing that thing. So you could take like, let's say, chess as an example, it might take for I can say 10,000 hours to become a grand master of chess. But then you can play the game in a few hours. So that's sort of what has happened here with say Tesla and SpaceX is that I have really way more than 10,000 into understanding how to build and grow a car company and a rocket company. And the satellites and all these things.
I also before SpaceX, you know, was a co-founder of two internet companies. So I understand the internet, I understand payments and all that kind of thing. And so the mental workload required once you have trained on something is very low compared to the training itself. That is how I'm able to do things that required immense amounts of training over decades. But only but do not require much mental workload once the training is completed. Now right now for government, although interface with government tremendously, this is. This is my first time actually trying to improve government. So there will be some initial training workload that is significant and then we'll move to inference, which is several orders of magnitude easier than training. I have not actually I'm not put in a bit for TikTok. And I don't have any plans for what would I do if I had to take talk. I mean, I guess I would look at the algorithm and try to decide how. How helpful or useful is this algorithm and what can we do to shift the algorithm to be more productive. And ultimately be beneficial to humanity. You know, we should just generally lean in the direction of something which is. More beneficial than than more harmful.
I don't use TikTok personally, so. You know, it's I'm not that familiar with it. I've just seen, you know, just see the videos occasionally appearing on X or people show me something. But I'm not jumping at the book at the book to acquire TikTok. I don't know acquire companies in general. It's quite rare that acquiring Twitter knuckle decks was highly unusual. I usually build companies from scratch. And the reason I acquired Twitter, which is what I said at the time, which is that it was important for to preserve freedom of speech in America and to the extent we're legally allowed to in the rest of the world. That's it was a fairly acquired Twitter would be an important productive step for the future of humanity. And even though it's it's really quite painful and has been very difficult. It was I thought I think none of us important to do so. I don't know if the same logic I don't know if the same logic applies to TikTok, but. So I'm not I'm not going to. I don't I don't I don't actually I don't acquire things just for economic reasons. And so I'm it's not clear to me what what the purpose of acquiring TikTok would be apart from economics.
I generally regard these movements as as positive. So and this this whole definition of what is right what is what is sort of a right wing what is left wing. This whole thing is shifted over time. Policies like simply having sensible immigration and. You know, since we're going to spend it in. Are those used to be in fact people on the left used to have those. Opinions as well and the centrist government certainly had those opinions. So. What we've seen in media is a defining. Things that used to be centrist to center left such as a sensible immigration policy as somehow far right, which is absurd and false.
Because it really far right should refer to extremely fascist situations like far right should refer to. You know, electing regimes that want to launch wars or genocides or something like that. That's what that far is supposed to mean far is not supposed to mean a sensible immigration policy. That literally if you took speeches from politicians that were center left and just go take this beaches from 10 15 years ago. They were literally saying the same thing. So what we've seen is really a drift left to. You know, it's a use the same modifier, but where a lot of companies actually are far left, but think they are centrist or think they are merely left or centrist, but they are actually far left compared to what the left. Was you can tell from. In years ago. You can take speeches for that Obama or Hillary Clinton gave about immigration and they sound identical to President Trump. And that's just as of 10 15 years ago, not that long ago. So I think what we've seen is a redefinition of what is right and left, but an inaccurate redefinition. And frankly, it's just propaganda because people are generally have the association that will anything far right must be bad. So then we're going to just label things that are common sense far right, which is absurd.
Now what I'm big fan of. President of a lay, he's doing fantastic job in Argentina. The results speak for themselves. I'm just here is. Argentina is experiencing unprecedented growth. He has inflation under control. Finally, he has reduced the size of government dramatically. And reducing the size of government is very important because you need to move people from low to negative productivity roles in the government sector to high productivity. And the economic improvement. If you move people from low to negative productivity roles to high productivity roles, then the output of goods and services increases and the standard of living increases. This is. Leaving is like, because sometimes people get caught up in that. They think money's real, but money's not real. Output of goods and services is real money is simply a representation of that.
Yes, well, let's just define what is meant here. I mean, if I work as one means. You know, just like racism on the basis of sex and gender and other matters, which. You know, D is simply racism rebranded. Then yes, I'm against racism and sexism, no matter who is directed against. It is entirely possible to be racist against white people or black people or agents or anyone else. And we should really accept no racism or sexism in any form, no matter what it's called. Dei and workers and. Essentially advocate racism is sexism. Sexism does wrong. They're also anti-meritocratic. So we should really, in my view, have a meritocratic society where people succeed on the as a function of their abilities and how hard they work. That should be the only way that people. Succeed and not through any some of the prior measures that are discriminatory.
So we need a meritocratic society and we need freedom of speech. And freedom of speech is only relevant if people are allowed. If people you don't like are allowed to say things you don't like. That is the only time freedom of speech is relevant. It can't be that the government is deciding what is missed. What is or is not misinformation or disinformation. Because then you get politics applying to those labels and in fact you simply get the suppression of freedom of speech. So really. I think it's work is is evil because it is racist sexist and anti free speech.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's very basic that if if people stop having. No, if there are no babies people stop having babies humanity will come to a halt. And we see now for many years very low birth rates in almost all of the world. So even India recently went to a replacement rate. So so that you will say well, we'll just we'll just replace people with immigration like immigration from where. If you look at China, for example, they are roughly at half a place with great. I think maybe it maybe 60% or something like that. So that means call it something like 600 million people will be lost. And of this generation will where you're going to get 600 million immigrants that would require almost two Americas to move to China. That's impossible. If you look at Korea, Korea has a replacement. The birth rate is now one third replacement rate. That means in three generations Korea, the size of the Korean population will be about three to four percent of what is currently is basically a career was a spirit. And I think that there are. Great things in every culture. We don't want the German German culture to disappear. We don't want French culture to disappear. We don't want a Korean culture to disappear or Japan or America or anywhere.
I think it's good. You know, this is part of why I'm like, I think we should be very cautious about. Having some sort of global mixing part because we will then not have every place will look will be the same and there won't be any unique cultures in the world, which I think would make the world worse. So I think we need to preserve these country cultures. And that's the future that I think is better. I think that most people would agree is better.
We should not have cultures disappear. And currently, basically on the current birth rates and the sort of. So called multiculturalism and globalism. What we're actually seeing is the dilution of individual cultures and the destruction and death of individual cultures, which I think is terrible for the future. Well, I think we are at an inflection point.
So we, I would recommend. You know, radical change in Europe. That encourages a much higher birth rate. I think this may require some very dramatic incentives. I think Europe needs to have a sensible immigration policy. You know, that where people are properly vetted before coming to Europe and if they commit crimes, they are deported. Otherwise you will have the destruction of Europe.
Also, you have to have a significant, a significant effort in deregulation. And basically removal of laws and regulations. So that you do not get hardening of the arteries until basically everything. It's illegal to do anything in Europe, which is what's basically happening now. So I'd recommend immediate and dramatic action for deregulation, freedom of speech, sensible immigration and improving the birth rate.