#1537 - Lex Fridman

To realize that this person is flawed because they were abused by their uncle or they got bullied throughout childhood or they have a disease or they're impaired mentally... There's something wrong with them. That's what you're dealing with when you're dealing with a lot of these people that are online who are angry. Their lives are not good. You're not getting people who live amazing lives that spend the vast majority of the day shitting on people on the Internet.

Commerce drives innovation. Innovation drives technology. Technology is what we create—we just do it in a weird way. We do it through sex; we do it through social status; we do it through the need for respect, envy, [and] all these different things. But all that really does is drive technology, and that's ultimately the end of the line.

One of the big problems is the Democratic nomination process happened before [the] coronavirus ... The economy was doing well, [and] things were going just regular, so the boring, generic candidate won out. What we need now is a great, inspiring leader ... Joe Biden's strategy, currently, is to just sit back, don't say anything, and let Trump destroy himself.

That's why there's so much crime. There's so much crime because there are so many communities, [and] it's just deeply entrenched in what they are, whether it's the south side of Chicago or parts of Detroit. If you want to lower crime, you have to increase economic opportunity, you have to increase education, you have to make people feel like they're in a safer environment. You have to do something to make these neighborhoods better.

With Neuralink, people think that there's going to be some kind of leap into the totally transformative—a thing that totally changes the very nature of our civilization. I think it'll all be gradual. Just like the iPhone 1, 2, and 3, all this technology will slowly expand our capabilities.

In order to really appreciate the light, you got to experience the darkness. You have to know the darkness is real.

I'm not a fan of anything I do. I'm the biggest critic of everything I do... ever. That's just how it goes. I'm never satisfied. But that's also why I continue to do things.