Joe Rogan Experience #1891 - Duncan Trussell

A wide-ranging, mostly philosophical conversation recorded around Halloween 2022 with both men in clown suits. They open on The Intercept's reporting that DHS was working with Twitter to police 'mis-, dis- and mal-information' and spiral into the absurdity of a two-party binary, the wealth of ex-presidents, and the idea that leaders are projections of the collective unconscious. The middle turns to ancient civilizations and the pyramids, UFOs/UAPs, and AI-generated VR/AR as a possible decentralized future. The back half gets personal and health-focused: seed oils and macular degeneration, the 1960s sugar-industry cover-up, the opioid crisis, video-game and Xanax addiction, and the Russia-Ukraine war. Duncan repeatedly lands on his thesis that the only real leverage anyone has is calming their own mind and reducing suffering, which then radiates outward.

• Duncan describes getting addicted to Xanax on an Australia tour from his dad's sleeping pills and white-knuckling through dangerous withdrawal.
  02:09:41
• Both Joe and Duncan admit to major video-game addictions (World of Warcraft, Hearthstone) and frame obsession as their personal 'monster'.
  01:28:44
• Duncan reveals he quit drinking and says staying stable and calm is 'working wonders'.
  02:46:33
• Duncan demos real-time AI-generated VR (Stable Diffusion / Deforum) and predicts wearable AR where everyone walks through a different personally-generated reality.
  01:35:30
• Joe links his own vision concerns and macular degeneration to seed-oil consumption, citing Paul Saladino's data.
  01:48:23
• Duncan frames his whole worldview: leaders mirror the collective unconscious, so reducing your own suffering is the real political act.
  02:37:38

• The Intercept reported years of DHS memos showing efforts to influence tech platforms over 'misinformation, disinformation and mal-information'.
  00:01:07
• Duncan's mother, studying psychology, hypnotized him as a kid and a wart fell off his hand days later.
  00:11:01
• Some King's Chamber stones in the Great Pyramid were reportedly transported from a quarry over 500 miles away.
  01:15:10
• Industrial seed oils (soybean, canola, corn, cottonseed) are linked to inflammation and age-related macular degeneration.
  01:48:54
• In the 1960s the sugar industry quietly paid scientists to shift blame for heart disease from sugar to fat.
  01:54:34
• CDC data cited shows nearly 70,000 people 18 and older died of opioid overdose in 2021.
  02:01:20
• US airstrikes are estimated to have killed 22,000 to 48,000 civilians across roughly 100,000 strikes since 9/11.
  02:40:45
• Obama's net worth is looked up at roughly $70 million, prompting a riff on paid presidential speeches.
  01:05:12
• Biden's federal marijuana-possession pardon released zero people because nobody is in federal prison for simple possession.
  02:59:32
• The conversation previews Nvidia's then-unreleased RTX 4090 video card and ray tracing while marveling at photorealistic racing games.
  01:35:00

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