''Is Reading Important?'' - Elon Musk

i was always sort of really interested in reading when i was a kid um and i read everything that i could get my hands on i read the encyclopedia probably age nine or ten well and not that i actually wanted to read the encyclopedia but i ran out of things to read so in desperation i read the encyclopedia just i just sort of i got bored easily and so unless i was doing something um like reading or uh playing a video game or watching tv and we had like terrible tv in south africa it was

really bad tv so there was only at best because there wasn't that much of it so boredom yeah so boredom led to a lot of reading oh i read thousands and thousands of books you know i like the sort of lord of the rings and the hobbit and that kind of thing and i was 14 15 i started reading reading some of the the philosophers nietzsche schopenhauer that sort of thing by people like dostoevsky oh brutal most the philosophers are really they're awful i mean they're so depressing and uh they're just you know some of

the things they they say are good ideas and then it's interspersed with so much rubbish but i was sort of you know early teen years trying to figure out meaning of the universal and and very difficult to come up with anything that wasn't some piece of arbitrary claptrap question is harder than the answer really it's the question that's the hard part and that takes a much bigger computer than earth to figure it out i think there's some truth to that when we ask questions there they come along with all of our biases and so that

there are so many things implied in the question that you should really ask is that the right question and that's very hard to figure out well i think you learn a lot depending upon you know whose life you're reading about um there are lots of lessons in there i read isaacson's biography of jobs which i thought was quite interesting and i actually really liked his biography of benjamin franklin who i would say certainly one of my heroes he seemed like a really great guy since i'm traveling so much and um [Music] that but i often

find i'm reading the books on my iphone which may sound like wow this is really tiny but honestly the book the book i'm reading which i was sort of thinking should i say this or not but um it's it's a book on howard hughes you know maybe a cautionary tale try and learn as much as much as possible that allows you to predict the future or make the future so they're saying is the best way to predict the future is to make it just and then assess whether what you're learning is enabling you to predict

the future with less error are you less wrong we're always wrong to some degree [Music] but can you reduce the error on your future predictions i think that's the way to look at education as of course but it's both creative create the future and predict the future so that includes art and all those other things but close the loop on being less wrong about future [Music] i would say that's the right way to think about education and the way education works right now it's extremely low bandwidth it's extremely slow lectures are the worst really it

was like very slow and i try to predict the future with less error this is the hot this is very hard as you were saying i'm not sure it's 99.9 but it's it's not very good generally a prediction of the future but i think often people don't try the first thing is try if you don't try okay you know got it you got to try and then and then adjust based on the error of your prior predictions well i studied physics and i'd certainly strongly recommend physics as a good grounding to understand the nature of

reality i mean physics is at fundamentally just understanding how does the universe actually work um and then that's a good foundation for then a variety of uh engineering disciplines and i think uh also the the analytical principles the the sort of analytical constructs used in physics uh apply to basically anything um it's you know phillips physics developed all these ways of of thinking like like first principles thinking uh thinking about things in the limit uh high and low um you're testing your hypothesis you know it's um the scientific principle essentially uh these things are incredibly

helpful in all arenas yeah well you know there's a lot of uh technical problems to solve um so i guess we sort of you know started studying kind of engineering and physics and biosciences and that kind of thing would be the way to go a lot gonna be a lot of problems to solve to to make a city work on mars um we were thinking of just as a sort of a semi joke putting a [Music] job description on our website for urban planner and brackets mars you know this there's going to be a tremendous

amount of problems solved there'll be there's a lot of building building and problem solving so those like the right you know skills to work on if if someone's interested in going beyond earth or you know space in general basically i sort of was thinking about this when i was when as a kid and trying to find some meaning in life like what's the meaning of life you know basically universe is the answer and you just need to figure out the questions so i think um you know that that's if i if i can help kind

of figure out the questions uh then that i consider that to be meaningful [Music]