Elon Musk Rates Memes and Ends Up Defending Nuclear Power, the British Museum and the Cheeseburger

Lex introduces the segment as something completely different and asks Musk to review memes on a scale of one to eleven, in the spirit of PewDiePie. He starts with a joke about Vlad the Impaler discovering marshmallows, which Musk calls not bad, and works through several printed jokes. One meme grounded in engineering and history gets an eight out of ten.

When the topic turns to nuclear power, Musk says he is in favor of it in places not subject to extreme natural disasters, and does not think existing stations should be shut down. He says the word radiation sounds scary to people who never studied engineering or physics, so they cannot calibrate what it means, and that it is much less dangerous than people think. Asked about Chernobyl, he returns to the point that fear far exceeds actual risk.

He recalls that after Fukushima, people in California asked him if they should worry about radiation, and his answer was definitely not, not even slightly. To prove it, he says he flew to Fukushima, donated a solar power system for a water treatment plant, and ate locally grown vegetables on TV. He describes the risk of such events as low and the impact as greatly exaggerated, which he calls human nature.

Musk says that when people ask about radiation from cell phones, he asks whether they mean photons or particles and at what frequency, and they usually have no idea. His point is that everything radiates all the time, and that anyone who wants to see nuclear fire can go outside and look at the sun. Lex agrees that radiation is a word used to fearmonger, and the cure is to learn.

Musk's argument for nuclear power is a comparison of deaths: practically nobody has died from nuclear accidents, while the number from coal plants is very large. He says it makes no sense to start up coal plants and shut down nuclear ones, and estimates coal to be 100 to a thousand times worse for health. Then he moves to the next meme, a math joke about 90, 180 and 360 degrees, which he finds not super funny.

A meme about the United States oscillating between establishing and destroying dictatorships earns a 7 out of 10 because it is kind of true. Then comes a joke about Laika, the dog launched into space, which Musk calls personal and gives an 11. Lex and Musk note that the joke is a reminder of the impact on the animal's loved ones, a story people are not told in full.

On the Russian theme, a meme jokes that nobody cares about the first man in space but everyone remembers the first man on the moon. Lex says he thinks people do care about Yuri Gagarin, and Musk says there is something special about stepping onto a foreign land, like landing on a new continent rather than exploring the oceans. He argues this is the more important milestone.

Lex reads a meme about Elon sending 6.6 billion dollars to the United Nations to end world hunger and asks for his comment. Musk says six billion dollars is obviously not going to end world hunger, because the world already produces far more food than it can consume. There is no caloric constraint, he says, so where hunger exists it is almost always due to civil war or strife.

He describes cases where one part of a country is literally trying to starve another, which makes the problem more complex than anything money could solve. Lex adds that it is politics, geopolitics, human nature, governments and monetary systems. Musk notes that food is extremely cheap these days, and that among low-income families in the United States obesity is the bigger problem than hunger, so adding money is not a simple fix.

A Monty Python-inspired meme asks where Britain got its artifacts, and the answer is that they were found in the British Museum. Musk says Britain did take historical artifacts from around the world to London, but people can still go see them, so he thinks on balance the museum is a net good. He adds that many countries would argue about this.

Lex says the aim is to make artifacts accessible to as many people as possible, even with the darker history of empire behind them, and that history cannot be erased, only improved on. Musk replies that judging an empire means asking what everyone else was doing at the time. By that standard he believes Britain would get a relatively good grade, though not in absolute terms.

Judge history by what is morally acceptable today, he says, and you give everyone a failing grade. Going back 300 years, he argues, practically no one would pass, and future generations may fail us as well. Musk gives the Monty Python meme a seven, saying he loves the group and their Holy Grail film.

A meme about serious eyebrows leads Lex to ask how important facial hair is to great leadership, and he teases Musk about his new haircut. Musk hopes it does not affect his leadership and gives the meme a six or seven. Lex jokes that this is a Shakespearean analysis of memes, and that showmanship must come from the eyebrows.

For a meme about invention, with the cheeseburger as the great invention after sliced bread, Musk jokes that he is just explaining memes and that his life has become that of a scribe running around with the kings writing down memes. They debate what counts as a burger or a sandwich, drifting into an argument about ontology. Lex suggests that bread and meat existed separately for a long time, and combining them in a handheld form was a materials problem that keeps your hands clean.

Musk says everyone knows what they are getting when they order a cheeseburger, calls fries awesome even if they are the devil, and says pizza is incredible. They agree food innovation does not get enough love. A Matthew McConaughey meme of President Kennedy asking NASA about the moon gets a six or seven.

The final meme, a joke about crude drawings on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, is the highest-ranked of the day, earning a nine. Musk says it is true, a staple consistent throughout human history, since as long as people have been able to draw there have been crude drawings of this kind.