Joe Rogan Experience #1898 - Neal Brennan

Neal Brennan joins Joe Rogan shortly after releasing his Netflix special 'Blocks', and the two open on cults, charisma, and why people gravitate to confident leaders. They spend a long stretch on COVID policy, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, the nursing shortage, and the lab-leak hypothesis, plus Joe's handling of the Spotify/Neil Young misinformation controversy. The conversation widens into free speech, Elon Musk's Twitter, bot/troll farms, Kyrie Irving and Amazon, January 6th, election integrity, and whether any 'board' could ever arbitrate truth. They also dig into the psychology of fame and online validation ('the juice'), relationships and gold-digging, and Neal's life as a comic. It closes with psychedelics, climate trade-offs via Bjorn Lomborg, and a sprawling riff on evolution and the universe creating itself.

• Neal describes a nightclub thumping bleeding into the audio during the monologue about his dying father at his first Netflix taping, which they had to scrub thump-by-thump.
  00:36:35
• Neal confesses to craving online validation ('the juice'), taking Instagram off his phone, then reinstalling it on release day and feeling himself turn into a 'despot in exile.'
  00:54:48
• Joe explains why he made his Neil Young/Joni Mitchell response video and how Spotify handled the boycott.
  01:05:48
• Joe and Neal agree any truth-arbitrating 'board' is impossible because nobody can agree who should sit on it.
  01:35:33
• Neal says a psychedelic (bufo/5-MeO-DMT) experience moved him from atheism, but that he encountered only 'indifference' and a 'super powerful force.'
  02:41:22
• Joe lays out his cosmology that humans are an 'amoeba stage' and the universe may be making itself through evolving life into a god-like energy.
  02:45:01

• George W. Bush reportedly practiced his swaggering walk, which 'in Texas is called walking.'
  00:04:15
• Adjusted for its older population, Florida fared better than many states by staying open while protecting the elderly.
  00:14:45
• Kyrie Irving was pressured to apologize and donate for linking to an antisemitic film that Amazon itself was selling for ~$11 to rent.
  01:55:21
• Myanmar military personnel posed as pop-star fans on Facebook, flooding it with hate to help incite ethnic cleansing.
  02:04:11
• A 60 Minutes segment described voting machines kept off the internet, paper-based, and counted onto disconnected drives.
  02:30:35
• Dunbar's number suggests humans are built to really know only about 150 people.
  03:01:45
• Bjorn Lomborg argues raising poor nations economically prevents more deaths (heat, tuberculosis, malaria) than a narrow climate focus.
  03:09:32
• Somali pirates originally called themselves 'The People's Coast Guard of Somalia' after foreign ships dumped toxic waste and overfished their waters.
  03:14:07

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