Post Malone on the Joe Rogan Experience #2018, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: Auto-Tune was invented by Andy Hildebrand, a geophysical engineer who adapted the autocorrelation math he had used for seismic oil exploration to detect and correct vocal pitch. Hildebrand released Auto-Tune in 1997 through Antares Audio Technologies, the company he founded, so crediting Antares as the maker of the program is correct. Post Malone's attribution conflates the company (Antares) with the individual inventor (Hildebrand), but the underlying credit is accurate: Antares Audio Technologies is the company that created and sells Auto-Tune.

What the evidence shows: The core premise is correct: Logan Paul (and his brother Jake) relocated to Puerto Rico around 2021 largely for its tax incentives, and Puerto Rico's Act 60 program (which consolidated the earlier Acts 20 and 22) offers qualifying new residents a 0 percent rate on many capital gains, interest, and dividends plus a 4 percent corporate rate. But the blanket claim that you do not have to pay taxes is wrong. Under Internal Revenue Code Section 933, only income sourced within Puerto Rico is excluded from U.S. federal income tax, and only for a bona fide resident; income from U.S. sources and gains accrued before the move (subject to a 10-year lookback) remain fully taxable federally. Qualifying also requires strict conditions, including physical presence of at least 183 days per year, no tax home outside Puerto Rico, buying a home there, and annual charitable contributions, and the IRS has opened audit campaigns targeting people who claimed the benefit without genuinely meeting the residency and sourcing rules.

What the evidence shows: Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, did author the 2019 book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, which argues that THC can trigger psychosis in some users. On the underlying science, Rogan's modest framing (a certain percentage of people, especially with high-dose THC, can have a psychotic or schizophrenic break) aligns with peer-reviewed findings: a multicentre case-control study in The Lancet Psychiatry (EU-GEI, 2019) found daily use of high-potency cannabis (THC 10 percent or greater) carried roughly five times the odds of a first psychotic episode versus never-users (odds ratio 4.8). The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse states that cannabis intoxication can induce a temporary psychotic episode in some people, especially at high doses, and that heavy use is linked to schizophrenia, particularly in young men and those with genetic vulnerability. The main caveat is that whether high-potency THC directly causes psychosis (versus a bidirectional or genetically confounded association) remains debated, and Berenson's book itself was criticized by researchers for overstating causation, but Rogan's narrower statement that it affects a certain percentage of people is well supported.

What the evidence shows: The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) did sponsor randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 3 trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, and the published results were strongly positive: in the first pivotal trial (Mitchell et al., 2021, Nature Medicine), 67 percent of the MDMA group no longer met PTSD diagnostic criteria after treatment versus 32 percent on placebo, and the confirmatory MAPP2 trial (2023, Nature Medicine) likewise showed significant symptom and functional-impairment reductions. Rogan's phrasing that the studies are specifically for and with soldiers is imprecise: the pivotal trials enrolled people with severe, chronic PTSD from many trauma sources (childhood trauma, assault, and combat), not a soldier-only or veteran-only cohort, though military-related PTSD was represented and is a central motivation for the research. The underlying claim that MAPS ran MDMA-for-PTSD trials with strong results is accurate; the soldier-specific framing overstates the enrolled population.

What the evidence shows: The CIA's MKUltra program (launched in 1953, alongside the earlier Bluebird and Artichoke projects) was a real behavior-control research effort that experimented with LSD and other drugs on human subjects, and its stated aims included interrogation, mind control, and the search for a truth serum. Declassified 1975 Church Committee testimony by MKUltra chief chemist Sidney Gottlieb, published by the National Security Archive, describes CIA research into the intelligence applications of LSD and drugs administered in a truth-serum mode during interrogation, with the subject's lack of awareness treated as key. The 1977 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on MKUltra documents the same program of drug experimentation on human subjects for behavioral modification and interrogation. Rogan's characterization of the program's existence and purposes is consistent with the declassified record.

What the evidence shows: The British government did dose servicemen with LSD at the Porton Down chemical warfare research base. In 2006 the Foreign Office confirmed that MI6 paid compensation to three ex-servicemen given LSD without their informed consent during tests in 1953 and 1954, after they had been told they were helping find a cure for the common cold. Filmed footage of British troops on LSD also exists, but the well-known film (the Moneybags trial, in which volunteers from 41 Royal Marine Commando took LSD during a field exercise) was made in November 1964, not the 1950s, so Rogan conflates the 1950s dosing tests with the later filmed exercise. The underlying claim that Britain gave soldiers acid and that video of it exists is accurate, though the specific 1950s footage he implies is really the 1964 Royal Marines film.

What the evidence shows: It is well documented that as a Harvard undergraduate Ted Kaczynski was one of 22 subjects in a psychological study run by psychologist Henry A. Murray from 1959 to 1962, in which participants were strapped to a chair and subjected to abusive mock interrogations that Murray called vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive. That study measured responses to stress and ego attack, not the effects of psychedelics: there is no evidence LSD was administered to Kaczynski, and he did not recall taking any drug in it. Murray had a documented separate interest in LSD and an OSS (pre-CIA) background, and some authors speculate the study was linked to CIA mind-control research, but that link is unproven and the drug connection is guilt by association rather than fact. Calling it the Harvard LSD studies conflates Murray's stress-interrogation experiment with the broader, drug-focused MKUltra program.

What the evidence shows: This describes Operation Midnight Climax, a real CIA subproject of MKUltra that ran from the mid-1950s into the mid-1960s. The 1977 Senate joint hearing record confirms that unwitting drug testing, including surreptitious LSD administration, was carried out in CIA safehouses in San Francisco and New York City. Historical accounts and Snopes document that federal narcotics agent George Hunter White ran the safehouses, that prostitutes on the CIA payroll lured men who were then dosed without their knowledge, and that agents observed the subjects through one-way (two-way) mirrors. Rogan's summary matches the documented record, with the minor imprecision that the drug was specifically LSD and the observation glass is technically a one-way mirror.

What the evidence shows: In August 2023, multiple outlets reported that Post Malone bought the unique one-of-one The One Ring card from Magic: The Gathering's Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set, the only serialized 001/001 copy of that card. NPR reported the sale, with the card valued as high as 2 million dollars, while Forbes reported the price at 2 million dollars. The card had been pulled from a booster pack by a Canadian collector, Brook Trafton, who sold it directly to the rapper, a longtime Magic player who had previously paid roughly 800,000 dollars for a signed Black Lotus. The claim of a 2 million dollar purchase is consistent with contemporaneous reporting.

What the evidence shows: Wizards of the Coast released a single serialized one-of-one The One Ring card in the June 2023 Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth crossover set, the first time a unique Magic: The Gathering card could be pulled from a booster pack. The card was pulled from a collector booster in June 2023 by Brook Trafton, a retail worker in Toronto, and authenticated in mint condition by PSA. Trafton then sold it to Post Malone, a longtime Magic player, for a reported price around 2 million US dollars. Post Malone (who bought the card directly from Trafton) is recounting his own transaction, and every element (the LotR collaboration, the single one-of-one card, the Toronto finder named Brook) matches the reporting.

What the evidence shows: The B83 is the most powerful weapon in the current U.S. nuclear stockpile, with a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons (1,200 kilotons), per Scientific American. The Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of about 15 kilotons, per Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dividing 1,200 by 15 gives exactly 80, so the 80 Hiroshima-bombs comparison is arithmetically correct. One technical caveat: the B83 is a gravity bomb rather than a missile warhead, and it has a variable dial-a-yield that can be set far below its 1.2-megaton maximum, but the figures Rogan cites are accurate.

What the evidence shows: The specific numbers read on-air do not line up with authoritative estimates for the era. Federation of American Scientists data (compiled by Our World in Data) puts the U.S. active warhead stockpile at 3,822 in 2017 and 3,785 in 2018, not 5,244, while the total inventory including retired warheads awaiting dismantlement was roughly 6,450, so 5,244 matches neither figure. The 857.6 megaton total yield is far below the Cold War peak: estimated deliverable megatonnage for the United States topped 10,000 in the early 1970s and had fallen to about 1,006 megatons by 2010 (the last year in that dataset), and no government or major tracking body publishes an official aggregate yield for the modern arsenal. The paired Hiroshima count is simply a derivation (857.6 megatons divided by a 15-kiloton Hiroshima yield equals 57,173), so it inherits whatever error is in the megatonnage figure. The values are internally self-consistent but appear to come from a dated or non-authoritative snapshot rather than a current stockpile assessment.

What the evidence shows: Canada did invoke the Emergencies Act in February 2022 and used it to freeze bank accounts tied to the Freedom Convoy: finance officials reported that roughly 206 to 210 accounts holding about 7.8 million dollars were frozen, without a court order, and most were released once the emergency was revoked on February 23. However, the framing that the government froze the accounts of people who simply donated is misleading. The RCMP said it gave banks the names of convoy organizers and truck owners who refused to leave, not a list of the roughly 100,000-plus donors, stating it never provided a donor list to financial institutions. Officials acknowledged it was unlikely, though not impossible, that a small donor would be captured, and the broad wording of the regulations drew criticism, but ordinary donation alone was not the stated basis for the freezes. So the underlying event is real while Rogan's characterization overstates who was targeted.

What the evidence shows: The FDIC standard deposit insurance amount is 250,000 dollars, and the FDIC confirms it applies per depositor, per insured bank, per ownership category. So the headline figure Post Malone cites is correct for a single account category at one bank. However, the framing that a billion-dollar balance is only ever paid out 250,000 dollars is an oversimplification: the FDIC notes that deposits held in different ownership categories at the same bank are separately insured up to 250,000 dollars each, and funds spread across multiple FDIC-insured banks are each covered separately, so total insured coverage can far exceed 250,000 dollars. The number is accurate as a per-category, per-bank cap but incomplete as a description of a depositor's maximum possible coverage.