First, the characters.

On one side of the table sits Joe “Toe” Rogan. The most radically centrist man in the known universe. A man who, on this very podcast, cites the New York Slimes and LA Times as his two favorite news outlets. An allegedly self-professed moron (I couldn’t find an admission of low IQ beyond his love of “dumb things”), Toe draws out brain expanding exchanges from his guests. For example:

Toe: What’s the odds of this (conversation) being a replayed memory?

Musk: There’s no way to assign a probability with accuracy here.

Toe: Right. But roughly?

On the other side of the table is Elon Musk: entrepreneur, father of 6, and anointed cult leader of every nihilistic secular humanist under 30 that wants their brains uploaded to a Google Drive before they die.

This podcast gives us a little bit of everything from ole Elon. There is a lengthy, illuminating discussion on AI, and a few bold predictions on his new Neuralink venture. “Optimistically” within 5 years, he says, humans will be able to communicate telepathically. This coming from the man who still can’t figure out self-driving cars after predicting a Tesla would be able to drive from LA to New York by the end of 2017. To his credit, he said a more realistic target for human telepathic capabilities would be a modest 10 years.

Toe makes the keen observation that aliens are depicted with small mouths and huge heads, a possible development for the evolution of humanity should the Neuralink vision ever become reality. Elon ponders if speech has a future. Toe, in his wisdom, speculates that losing the beauty and positive effects of speech could be negative. Elon, naturally not having any acumen in the art of speech, shrugs it off as “worth it.”

A few other choice excerpts that I enjoyed:

1. Elon contemplates destroying “mind-viruses” or “cockeyed concepts” like “fundamentalist ideas” in people’s minds through Neuralink and Toe raises no concern over this power being abused.
2. Toe argues that a monkey riding a bike and attacking a child could be proof that it is operating with consciousness.
3. Elon autistically laughing throughout his explanation of how people die from liver failure from taking Tylenol after drinking alcohol.

Elon also casually mentions colonizing Mars so his acolytes can, for a moment, recall their dream of affordably vacationing away from our bountifully green and beautiful planet to a barren, hostile red rock that takes a year to travel to. Of course, this will be more useful as an escape plan for the human species should Earth ever experience an extinction event. I, personally, would feel much more secure if I knew there was a place tens of millions of miles away that promised a bleak and tenuous existence inside a manmade bubble habitat. Perhaps I could be one of the Excelceites living in a vast pleasure dome, as envisioned in Sam Hyde’s prescient 2070 Paradigm Shift.

The end of the podcast veers towards Toe’s areas of expertise: diet, exercise, and martial arts. In many ways, this was the consummate Toe Rogan podcast – he fit in two references to monkeys, added a comment about his career in comedy, talked about martial arts, flexed his wise centrist mindset, and gave wide eyes to theoretical sci-fi fantasies like AI.

The only thing missing from this podcast is drugs. No alcohol, no marijuana and no promotion of DMT. No, one can imagine that, after the blunt-puffing PR debacle of Elon’s first visit, he only came back on drug-free terms. The sober atmosphere made the initial awkwardness of the interview very palatable. Compare the first 15 minutes of each interview and see the difference for yourself.

If you are interested in getting some insight into the reddit-sphere, this podcast is a good update on that general demographic’s thoughts on Coronavirus, as well as the Cargo Cult of Elon Musk. To be clear, I do not blame Elon for this cadre’s devotion to his intellect, though he does pander to it. I just have an intense skepticism toward any man with that much cosmetic enhancement.

I leave you, reader, with this – Elon predicted on May 7 that reopening the economy would happen “extremely fast over the next few weeks.” Plan accordingly.