“You must understand there’s not a whole lot of humans like you. You know that, right?”
So says Joe Rogan near the top of his two and a half hour podcast interview with Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who now counts himself the latest among a litany of Rogan guests that includes Infowars’ Alex Jones, “alien mode” Tom DeLonge, and Jordan “Enforced Monogamy” Peterson. No, there is assuredly not a lot of people like Musk, whose ingenuity is matched only by his capacity for being a gigantic asshole.
There’s the union-busting, the history of GOP donations, the farting unicorn mug, the support of a sex cult’s shoddy journalism, the shadow he’s cast over Grimes, that whole incident where he continually called a heroic rescue diver a “pedophile,” and, of course, whatever the hell was going on with Azealia Banks.
This being Joe Rogan, however, nearly none of this is discussed. Instead, Rogan decided to get Musk, a very prominent business figure whose actions directly impact his companies’ stock, stoned. After lighting up a joint containing tobacco mixed with marijuana—legal in California, FYI—he casually hands it to Musk, who says he’s not a “regular smoker of weed.” (Yeah, we know.) Still, showing the excellent judgement that he’s displayed so much as of late, he takes a big, hearty puff. Moments later, he checks his phone: “I’m getting text messages from friends saying ‘what are you doing smoking weed?’” Today, The Los Angeles Times reports Tesla’s stock dropped by 10% and two senior executives bailed. Oops.
Elsewhere in the interview, the pair spend a great deal of time discussing space travel and the terraforming of Mars “into a big Jamaica”—“That would be great,” Musk says, giggling—the need for regulation in artificial intelligence (no complaints here), and Musk’s plan to implant tiny electrodes into the human brain via his Neuralink company, which he says will have “something interesting” to announce in a few months that will be “an order of magnitude” ahead of what people currently think is possible.
If that sounds a bit heady, fear not, because it’s not long before this happens:
Yes, that is Elon Musk holding Joe Rogan’s samurai sword. “I know you’re into weapons,” Rogan says, a sentence that should send chills up your spine.
They also talk flamethrowers, to which Musk is well acquainted, and the 2002 action fantasy Reign of Fire, which we criticized for “plod[ding] along from one dragon fight to the next.” Musk hasn’t seen it, but something tells us he’d like it.
Still, Musk is at his most stoned before ever taking that fateful puff. Have fun following this one:
“We’re one notch above a chimp,” Musk says at one point. And, as this interview proves, he couldn’t possibly be more right.
Listen to the full interview below: