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Elon Musk on WEED & How His BRAIN Works

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Inside Elon Musk’s head, there’s no off switch — and a six-second puff on Joe Rogan’s podcast nearly convinced Wall Street otherwise.

Entrepreneur Evan Carmichael’s video breakdown, “Elon Musk on How His Mind Really Works,” pulls together the most revealing moments from Musk’s September 6, 2018 appearance on episode #1169 of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a marathon conversation that ran more than two and a half hours and covered AI, flying electric planes, samurai swords, Neuralink, and Mars colonization. The clip that dominates Carmichael’s cut isn’t really about weed at all — it’s about how Musk describes the machinery running inside his skull, and what happened to Tesla stock the moment a lit joint entered the frame.

• Musk told Rogan his mind feels like a “never-ending explosion” of ideas he’s struggled to quiet since childhood, adding, “I don’t think you’d necessarily want to be me.”
• More than two hours into the taping, with Rogan drinking whiskey, he lit a joint mixed with tobacco and marijuana; after confirming it was legal in California, Musk took a brief, six-second puff.
• Tesla shares fell roughly 6% the next day, a drop compounded by the abrupt departures of chief accounting officer Dave Morton and head of HR Gaby Toledano.

The Never-Ending Explosion

Carmichael’s video leans hardest on the part of the Rogan conversation that had nothing to do with cannabis: Musk’s own description of his cognitive wiring. He told Rogan that ideas don’t arrive one at a time — they detonate continuously, and turning that off has never been an option, going back to early childhood. It’s the kind of admission that reframes everything else people know about him, from running Tesla and SpaceX simultaneously to founding Neuralink and the Boring Company on the side.

“I don’t think you’d necessarily want to be me.”

That line lands differently once you know the context: Musk wasn’t complaining about fame or money. He was describing what it actually feels like to be inside his own head — a state closer to sensory overload than genius-at-work, which is exactly the kind of unfiltered self-assessment that separates a two-and-a-half-hour podcast from a scripted interview.

The Six Seconds That Moved Markets

The moment everyone remembers happened well past the two-hour mark. Rogan lit a joint containing a mix of tobacco and marijuana, checked that it was legal in California, and passed it to Musk, who took a brief puff before handing it back. Musk was explicit on air that he almost never smokes — he compared it to “a cup of coffee in reverse,” the opposite of what he needs to stay productive running two aerospace-and-automotive companies at once.

None of that context stopped the six-second clip from going viral within hours. By the next trading day, Tesla shares had dropped about 6%, a slide that piled on top of the sudden exits of chief accounting officer Dave Morton — who had been in the job less than a month — and head of HR Gaby Toledano. Investors weren’t just reacting to a joint; they were reacting to a pattern of instability at the top of the company, and the podcast gave that instability a viral image.

Obsessive Focus as the Real Story

Where Carmichael’s breakdown adds value is in refusing to let the marijuana moment eclipse the rest of the conversation. Musk’s comments about AI, Mars colonization, and Neuralink during that same sitting show the same “never-ending explosion” mentality applied to problems most CEOs never touch — brain-computer interfaces, interplanetary logistics, autonomous flight. The obsessive, can’t-turn-it-off focus that makes Musk difficult to categorize is the same trait that lets him run SpaceX and Tesla as parallel, unrelated bets rather than a single tidy business plan. That kind of relentless, multi-front thinking shows up across the interviews Carmichael tends to feature — the same instinct that shows up in other billionaires’ accounts of how they structure their days and in the routines profiled in breakdowns of why high performers guard their mornings so fiercely.

Musk had already been on record about his stance toward the drug before Rogan ever lit up. In a tweet the year before the podcast, he wrote, “I don’t smoke pot… As anyone who watched that podcast could tell, I have no idea how to smoke pot.” The six-second clip, in other words, wasn’t a hidden habit surfacing — it was a rare, almost clumsy exception to a rule Musk had already stated publicly, which is part of why the market reaction looked disproportionate to what actually happened on camera.

Carmichael’s video ends where the podcast’s real substance was all along — not the joint, but the admission that Musk’s mind simply doesn’t stop generating, whether the subject is a Mars mission or a decision he’ll spend the next 24 hours defending to shareholders.