Highlights from Elon Musk’s interview with Joe Rogan

@kateclarktweets / 11:02 am PDT • September 7, 2018

Elon Musk made an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast hosted by the eponymous comedian, where the pair smoked a blunt and pondered the flat-Earth movement, the future of AI, “inventing shit” and several other of the eccentric billionaire’s favorite topics.

The now-viral interview, which was live-streamed to thousands of viewers, was immediately followed by two high-profile executive departures at Tesla. The company’s stock temporarily dropped 10 percent Friday.

Here are a few highlights.

Elon Musk probably got high. We weren’t in the room with him, but the Tesla CEO looks to have inhaled what was described as a mixture of marijuana and tobacco. “You probably can’t because of stockholders,” Rogan said to Musk before he took a hit of the blunt. “I mean, it’s legal right?” Musk asked, proceeding to smoke.

He vented about the negative effects of social media: “Particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than they really do,” Musk told Rogan. “People basically seem like they are way better-looking than they really are and they are way happier-seeming than they really are. If you look at everyone on Instagram, you might think ‘man, there are all these happy, beautiful people and I’m not that good-looking and I’m not happy, so I must suck.'”

In the words of Rogan, Musk just can’t stop “inventing shit.” But being Musk comes at a high cost. “I don’t think you’d necessarily want to be me,” he said. “I don’t think people would like it that much.” Rogan, in response, suggests meditation and an isolation tank.

He worries about the future of AI — but not as much as he used to. “The danger is going to be more humans using it against each other, I think, most likely, that’ll be the danger, yeah,” he murmured.