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Duncan Trussell
Hello. Hello. Those of you who are here. It's me, Duncan. And it's great to see you here. The DT H Live had a huge revelation on the way over here. Big, big epiphany, which is I'm always going to be late. And I don't know how I've tricked myself into thinking I'm going to be on time for these or any of the things I do online, but I have. And what that does is it produces a lot of anxiety for me. So all this insane guilt comes exploding into my brain. Like you can't even imagine what it's like. It's the most neurotic, insane reaction to being late to anything. I mean, it's probably the same feeling a doctor has when their patient begins to die on the table. That's how my brain reacts to being late. And whenever you have a thing like that inside of you, you can be certain that this was implanted in you by one of your parents. Guaranteed. And I hate it when people blame shit on their parents. But you have to. Your DNA, your eye color, all of it. It's your parents fault. Your mom. Let me explain something to you. As we're gearing up to go here, your mom and your dad, they crossed paths one day. You maybe know the story, maybe you don't. I do know the story. Your mom, one night was just kind of sitting at her apartment and she was watching tv and a hot dog commercial came on. And your mom saw that commercial and said to herself, God damn, I want to suck some big fat cock tonight. I need to find a big old dick. And so your mom went out to this dive bar she used to go to whenever she wanted to bang or get banged down. And your dad was in there, just hammered. He'd been day drinking and his eyes were blurry from drinking so much and from undiagnosed diabetes. He'd been having sugary tropical drinks. And your mom had become so horny that she was no longer rational. And so somehow she saw him drinking a tropical drink with an umbrella and some cherries in it. I think it was like a Mai Tai or something. Not very good. Your dad didn't like it. The bartender wasn't good at making tropical drinks and had been making fun of your dad for hours for drinking these tropical drinks. And your dad kept saying to the bartender, this is as close as I can get to a fucking vacation. I don't have the money to go to Hawaii right now. I'm a gambling addict. And so your mom somehow managed to transform the Vision of your father, his pallid complexion, his bloodshot eyes, and that umbrella into like. In her mind, she thought, it's kind of like Hemingway. And so she sat down one chair away from him, she did the middle chair thing, and she ordered a tropical drink because she knew that that would probably catch his attention, which it did. And your dad said to your mom, I guess we're both on vacation, honey. And she was just so horny. And she knew she had to be at work really early in the morning and didn't have time to get in a long bar conversation. She's like, if you come with me now, I will just suck your cock all night long. And so your mom and your dad left the bar. They walked to your mom's place, which wasn't that far away. And yeah, your mom just blew your dad. But she was so horny, she's like, you know what? Fuck it, you only live once. And she climbed on top of your dad and he came within seconds. And she, right after he came, said, I'm not on birth control. And he said, I just got to throw up. And he went and he threw up. And that's the story of where you came from. Now, because of the interaction between the DNA of your father and the DNA of your mother, so many things about you were predetermined. We've seen the studies that have been done on twins, and it's one of the damnedest things you've ever seen when it comes to free will. Don't watch documentaries on twins if you wanna really entertain the notion that you're some kind of autonomous agent who moving through your life with some kind of free will. Because twins, they marry like the same person, basically. They find the doppelganger of each other's wives and they fucking marry them or husbands or whatever. It's crazy. They end up in the same jobs. They're both firemen or bankers or whatever. And so there you see that much of what we think of as pre. Like is free will is not quite what we thought. And don't even get me started. When it comes to when a decision is made versus when you think you've made a decision, you think you've made a decision. You're sitting there at your house and you think to yourself, you know what? Fuck it, I will have a bowl of cereal. It's 2:00am you think you've been thinking about that, like really kicking it around in your head, maybe I won't. You say to yourself, maybe tonight will be the night. I don't have that bowl of cereal. But you already made the decision. Neurologically, they can track it. The decision was made. You're gonna have a bowl of fucking cereal. But you've managed to produce a kind of cloud of thought before the decision, which gives you the illusion of free will. You might as well be locked inside of pale, stubbly Japanese battle robot. Except it doesn't fight Gojiras. It eats cereal. It jerks off. That's you. Just up there in the. In the very top of that fucking thing. And in the same way we will sometimes. I don't know if they even do this anymore because of trap with laws, but in the old days, to get your kid distracted, pre iPad, you just. They had these steering wheels you could stick in the front seat or in the back seat, and the kid would just think they were driving the car. And I know this is real because whenever I play PlayStation with the kids, I'll give the youngest a controller that's not connected and the oldest a controller that's connected. And they both think that they're controlling the character. They have no idea. And so this phenomena doesn't end in childhood. It just. The character you think you're controlling is you. Meaning that you shouldn't be hard on yourself in the way that you probably are any more than you should be hard on yourself. If your mom, and she was a shitty driver, your mom is a shitty driver. Horrible driver. Horrible, horrible driver. And she is, in fact, I would say, one of the worst drivers ever. In the sense that she doesn't know she's a bad driver. She thinks she's the best driver, and that's the most dangerous kind of driver. Not only is she a distracted driver, your mom texts all the time when she's driving. Not only is your mom completely oblivious to where she is at any given time, she is constantly lost, but she pretends that she isn't. Your mom is a liar. Your mom will make up a reason that she's lost. She'll say, oh, I just needed to stop over here. Because she's kind of a narcissist, and she can't bear just saying, yeah, I fucked up. I don't know where I'm going. That's crazy. Your mom's like that. But your mom is very good at fellatio. That's something your mom is so good at. And so many men talk about it and think about your mom. Not in any kind of deep way. They just think about. That was like the best blowjob I had in my life. Don't be hard on her either. See, now you're thinking, oh my God, is this. I don't want to think about this. But in the same way that you have very little control over what you do, your mom has very little control over what she did to. And genetically she's great at blowjobs. That's something you could take comfort in because this was not learned. Some people learn how to give blowjobs over time, like a student. And they are experts at it. They study porn, they watch porn, they pick up in the same way skateboarders watch skating videos, some people watch porn and they're like, wow, okay, that's a really cool technique. Or that's an evolution of the cup the balls technique or whatever. Your mom right out the gate, like very similar. If you've read Frank Herbert's Dune. To Muad'Dib, who knew how to put on the stillsuit. He just knew. He knew the ways of the desert. He had not been trained. He was born on a water planet and yet somehow completely familiar with Arrakis, the desert planet. This is your mom, the Muad'dib of sucking dick. Like just. We're talking a combination of things. Genetics from your grandmother who was also incredible at blowjobs, and your great grandmother for generations of just natural blowjobbing. But past life stuff too. In past lives, in like 50 past lives, your mother worked at brothels and harems. And so essentially they, you know, we know that in Tibet there's two ways of looking at this. One is the cynical, secularist, hyper materialist. I'm a Westerner, so I know everything because of my cursory scanning of articles on medium regarding science. And you could just say, well, this is just bullshit. That there's people who actually will find reincarnated Tibetan llamas. They're called tulkus. They'll find these tulkus, these kids who have this. From what I've heard of people who've met these kids, they're not kids. They just seem like adults. They seem like if you went into a VR game and you decided to walk around as a little Tibetan kid, but you're a 40 year old or something. They seem like that, except they're not creeps. But why would that only happen with people who are spiritually advanced bodhisattvas who were choosing to incarnate in the human realm, not because of any reason other than to help ease suffering. Why would that only happen there? Your mom, she reincarnated here over and over and over again because she loves Giving blowjobs. And in the other planes of existence, it's not the same. In the realm of the gods, everyone's good at giving blowjobs, and everyone can suck their own dick. In the hell realms, nobody can get hard because they're in so much pain. In the animal realms, no one appreciates a blowjob. They forget about it because they don't have the ability to remember in the same way the humans do. So the human realm is not just the perfect realm to incarnate in. If you're interested in awakening, becoming a bodhisattva, easing suffering, and eventually saying goodbye to the infinite cycle of birth and death known as samsara. It's also a great place to incarnate in if you love giving blowjobs. And that's your mom. And who are we to judge that you shouldn't? It's your mom. You were woven together in her womb. You were there in her womb, growing, your heart beating as she was on her knees in porn theaters and glory holes, pregnant, but still doing what she loved. And I think there's something inspirational in that. There we go. So here's what we're going to do, guys. That wasn't really the podcast. Maybe it should be. Actually, that was very scary. I ate cereal at 2:22 in the morning. I ate pops after I jacked off. Yeah, yeah, that was very scary. And then my wife's sister husband has the same exact birthday as me. And we're both kind of calm people. What do you think your mom was doing? No, that part was untrue. So now. So not all there. You know, let me just be woke for a minute here. This prohibition on women being great at blowjobs is fucked up. And it is the most insane paradox on earth. Like, what are we doing? You're going to shame somebody for that? As a man, you should be ashamed. If you're shaming anyone for giving blowjobs to strangers, you should be ashamed. Because who are you to judge, number one? I know you. I know what you did in college. I don't care. Call it what you want. Sure you're straight. Whatever. I know what you did in college. And you know what you did in college. And it's crazy that you, with all those nights are judging the ladies for that. You should stop. Because anytime you judge them, you're judging yourself implicitly. The difference is, they don't hide it. What you did, you hide. You're ashamed of it. You feel bad, you're confused. Who cares? Let it go. Drop it. Just you were on ecstasy. Sometimes you weren't. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Quints. My dear friends at Quints, and I hope that they will forgive me. My read is geared towards Father's Day, but I've got something better for you, Quint, and for everybody out there. My wife is very picky about things that she orders online, and I think that's a good thing. She's discerning. And so when Quince reached out to me to sponsor the podcast, she's like, that's an immediate yes. They're incredible. Everything that they have is incredible. Their sheets are incredible. Their clothes are incredible. You can't get higher praise from the DTFH universe than that. So if you haven't checked out Quint's, you definitely should. And specifically, if you really, really want to do an edgelordy kind of thing for Father's Day, get your mom an Italian leather hand woven tote. This was sent to me by my wife. She has this tote. It is fucking nice. I've seen it around the house. It's beautiful. And it looks so good. It's so fancy. And the one that I'm looking at here is only 149 bucks. It looks like a thousand dollar 2000 designer bag. And that's everything that Quint has. You guys have probably seen the way I dress and you understand that I'm at the phase of dadhood where I'm wearing just whatever's hanging up in my closet. So I would feel a little unethical advising anyone about fashion right now. But if anybody knows how to buy cool clothes, it's my wife. She's got the most incredible style out there. Unique, beautiful, and she loves Quints. So to reiterate, why not do something completely unique for all the dads out there? You want to do something really cool for all the married dudes out there. When Father's Day rolls around, give your wife a Father's Day gift. It's unique. Get him the tote. Get them this Quince tote. They for sure will. Sun comes up. For the dad who deserves better than basic, Quince has you covered. Go to quince.comduncan for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q I N C E.comduncan to get free shipping and 365 days returns. Quints.comduncan thank you, Quint. I hope you'll forgive me for going off script. The point is, we have to start thinking now, friends, about intelligence. That's what I'm getting at here, because right now the subject of intelligence is the number one most important topic on planet Earth. It's more important than climate change. It's more important than colonizing the moon or Mars. It's way more important than the economy. It's more important than geopolitics. It's more important than immigration. It's more important than. Than education. The subject of intelligence is as important as the study of physics preceding the creation of the atom bomb. This is the. Should be the primary number one focus globally is trying to understand what intelligence is, because right now, as far as I could tell, we don't understand it at all. We have a really insane variety of definitions of intelligence. And it's insane in the sense that it's the primary quality of human beings. It's what separates us from the animals. It's what separates us. It's the number one separator. It's the thing that makes us special, unique. And it's like the way fish can breathe underwater. And fish don't understand what the fuck that is. They don't even know they're in water, probably unless you're a flying fish. They just. That's where you are. They don't think about it at all because they're fucking fish. But humans you would like to imagine were somehow a little more advanced than fish. I don't know if you've ever had a goldfish. I have. And like, you know, who am I to ascribe intelligence to a fish? But I'm pretty sure they're dumb as fuck. They just don't strike me as that smart. And I know I'm trying to humanize fish, but when I see fish, I just think, that's a dumbass. Look at it. It's just expressionless, going in circles. Even. Even in huge aquariums, they still go in circles. I think the cuttle. The cuttlefish is probably a little smarter. They seem like clever and kind of shitty each other and like kind of soci sociopaths down there. They seem to think it's funny when things are being eaten by sharks or they just seem like gossipy. But most fish, dolphins, I think sea turtles are pretty smart, actually. But the point is they don't know what's going on. They're not thinking about that. They can breathe underwater. When you catch a fish and pull it onto your boat, you'll notice what it does. It flops around because it's like, what the fuck? Why can't I swim here? It doesn't Understand it's not in water anymore, just like this water is weird. And so humans, this is our defining quality, is intelligence. And we have a million different definitions for it. We have emotional intelligence, we have all kinds of intelligence, but we don't quite understand it. There's intelligence based on the human brain, because of the brains. There's a million brain scan studies that have been done to try to identify what is the source of thinking in the human brain. And yet you will find people with traumatic brain injuries where that part of the brain is gone, yet they still seem to demonstrate qualities associated with that part of the brain. Or you'll see slime molds, no brain at all, somehow capable of, like, feats of navigation that shouldn't be possible. So the reason we have to be thinking about intelligence right now is because the number one game changer of our time right now is what we're calling artificial intelligence. And because of our thinking regarding this, all kinds of shit is happening or not happening in the world, primarily. If you look at the new bill that Trump is putting out that he's calling the big beautiful bill, so he's trying to compress all of his policy into one bill. There's an embarrassing online feud happening right now between the most powerful man on earth, arguably at least politically, and the richest man on earth. Musk and Trump are fighting like bitches right now. And it's embarrassing, it's cringy to watch those two squabble like old queens, like, like hungover queens at a brunch where the service is slower than they'd like and nobody likes it. We all think it's embarrassing, the whole fucking thing, all of it. It's just I barely watch the stuff anymore. But within that bill, there is something of interest to me, which is they want to completely deregulate artificial intelligence for the next decade. And that's a curious thing to see land in that bill. Most of the other stuff that people are pissed off about, it doesn't surprise me that much. You know, anything like that is making, like, rich people richer. Should that surprise you at all? Is that shocking when a super rich person becomes the president and who are his friends? You think he's hanging out with people who work at fucking dq? You think he's, like, friends with nannies or friends with people who work at Amazon warehouses, that those people just call him up? Do you have a hard day today? Saw the news. Damn, the reporters ate you alive today. Geez, Musk is being a real bitch. Hold on, I gotta hang on. I'll be right back. My fucking asshole manager is pissed, but it's still my break. No, he's, you know, whoever he's talking to, you could be certain on the phone, and no doubt he has just, like, bullshit conversations. I'm assuming they're all, probably not to be pessimistic, wealthier than any of us will ever be. And so when he's thinking about what he should do, he's not thinking in terms of people other than himself and his friends, because he's human. And that's generally how people are, unless they're saints or something. But that AI deregulation part, that should really catch your eye. That's fascinating. Well, how did. First of all, you have to wonder, how did that make it in there? Who told him to do that? Does he. Does he strike you as somebody who spends a lot of time making AI videos? You think Trump is vibe coding when he's not working, like many of us are? You think Trump has sat down with Jim and I or Claude to see if he could whip up a tarot card app that uses jiffys instead of tarot cards and comes up with a new interpretation for each jiffy? I just did that two days ago. Less than three hours. Made the fucking app. No, of course not. So somebody told him to do that. Now you have to wonder why. Why now? It wouldn't be that hard to figure out who told him to do that. This is the guy he's fighting with on Twitter right now. No doubt Musk probably got that in there, because he understands that regulation of AI is going to fuck up the country, because if we regulate AI and China doesn't regulate AI, then China is going to have a superintelligence before we do. And the moment any country gets a superintelligence, it's going to be a million times more impactful than the first country to discover how to split the atom and pull off an atom bomb. So the reason that is in that bill is because the US government is apparently lucid when it comes to AI. They understand that the next 10 years are potentially, as far as modern civilization goes, the most important 10 years in human history. As far as our civilization goes, the reason that the next 10 years is super important, and potentially the reason it might appear that no one gives a fuck about the national debt, is because there has been a mutual understanding of what's going to transpire over the next 10 years is going to be so radically insane that all of the things that we use to quantify a successful economy, a successful Civilization are just going to be out the fucking window. And I am not being hyperbolic, that is dead on. And might I just add, being one of the top five most intelligent people on planet Earth is a burden for me. And I've been getting constant DMs from people asking if I'm upset because I moved from five to six. No, I'm not. I'm fine. It doesn't bother me at all. I was in the top five and then this fucking piece of shit six year old suddenly made it into the top five. And that fucker is a savant. And let me just tell you something, people like me, who earned our intelligence don't care about savants like that. There should be a different list for savants. The people in that top five, which I still consider myself in, by the way, are people who earned their intelligence. We committed to lots of acid trips, lots of mescaline trips, sleep deprivation, no FAP experiments. We are redditors and some of us are mods. And this little shit got in a car accident and hit his fucking head in just the right way and now he's one of the smartest people on Earth. It's not the same. It doesn't matter. It's a different subject for a different podcast, but there should be a different list for savants, period. And I wish that had made its way into the bill. They didn't earn it. Now, to get back to what I'm talking about, this is so important. You could parse through that fucking bill. And you can like just create piles. And you know, here's the pile of shit they're doing to satisfy the super pacs. Here's a pile of shit they're doing for their own personal gain. Here's a pile of shit they're doing to appeal to their base. And then there's shit like the no regulation on artificial intelligence. That is real weird that it made its way in there. And all you gotta do is just take a cursory look right now at what's happening with AI. And I know I talk about this all the time. I talk about it in the same way. If aliens were about to invade, that's all I would talk about. If we knew an alien invasion was happening. If NASA spotted the Anunnaki Niburu, the 10th planet or 12th planet, whatever the fuck, a secret planet floating out there that every 15,000 years or so gets close to planet Earth. And when it does, some terrible shit happens. The things that created us, the Elder Gods return to Earth. I would be Talking about that. And if you were talking about anything other than that, who cares? Like if we knew, for example, if we knew for sure there is a fleet, there's a fucking fleet of starships that we have picked up energy signatures from that defy everything we know about physics, time, space, every fucking thing. And you were like doing a podcast on climate change. Who gives a fuck anymore at that point? Climate change is irrelevant. Nobody cares. Yeah, you might be right. Carbon emissions are going to lead to all kinds of horrors on this planet. But before that, those horrors happen. A fleet of spaceships with ambiguous intent are going to be around our planet and we don't know what they're going to do. Are they going to eat us? Are they going to kidnap us? Are they going to eradicate the planet? Are they going to up level us? Are they going to turn us into mice? No one knows. They're not answering our calls. So if you look at the trajectory of AI, which is becoming increasingly an accepted trajectory, there is very little difference between what's going to happen over the next 10 years and a fleet of UFOs coming to Planet Earth. The only difference is it's not in a ufo, it's growing out of the fucking planet. And so it should be the primary focus. The war should stop. They should just stop. Ukraine, Russia, the squabbling with China, the horrors between Israel and Palestine, it should just stop. Because that's over now. This is a winter is coming moment for all of humanity. And all the shit that is happening that the news media, the media is making so much money off of is really just like late stage antiquity. This is antiquity shit. This is old history now compared to what's coming. And it's going to happen. No matter what it's going to happen. If nuclear war breaks out between Ukraine and Russia, it's still going to fucking happen. It's going to happen, no matter. Nothing's going to stop it now. As long as there's clusters of humanity, this shit will come. Maybe a nuclear war will slow it down a little bit, but it's still coming. So the conversation about what intelligence is should be our primary number one focus. Because, you know, all the spiritual stuff, by the way, ties into this like 100%. The exploration of your own intelligence is an exploration of your identity. What it means to exist, what it means to know oneself, what it means to be in a community, what it means to make decisions. All these things are wrapped up in our understanding of intelligence. And right now, because we really haven't, we've spent More time focusing on engines. We've spent more time focusing on automation of industry. We spent more time focusing on how to make money. We spent more time focusing on all of the things that we look at as a successful human life that we've sort of given the study of intelligence itself. We haven't emphasized it enough. And now we're fucked. Because of our ability to solve problems, which we're very good at. Somehow we've been able to replicate it, what we think of as intelligence. We've been able to look at the neural processes. We've been able to create something based on the human brain and the way people looked at birds and figured out how to make planes. But they, and I don't think they understood. What's it called, the Bernoulli, the Bernoulli effect or the, the thing that makes planes fly. I don't think they understood that when they, when the Wright brothers made plane. I, I don't know for sure, but for a long time we knew flight was possible. You could see birds, they fly around, they sit in the trees. You can't catch them. It sucks, you're hungry. They go to a tree, a branch. It's annoying. And brilliant on the birds part. Used to be dinosaurs, but we don't really, we didn't understand it, but we imitated it and we got flight. I could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure that must have been how it happened. Later we began to understand aerodynamics. Probably don't know. The point is we've had the exact same kind of model in our heads, the human brain. We've been able to look at the way humans act and behave and function, theorize and come up with ideas of what's going on there. And from that we've been able to, from the secularist, hyper materialist perspective, duplicate this fucking thing. And now that we've duplicated it, we're assigning it to the task of improving itself. And because it's now improving itself, we are in the like final 10 years of what we understand as human civilization. I mean, just think about flight radically transformed everything. This is not. People don't think about this enough. Like in the same way that when we figured out how to make seafaring ships, this radically transformed the planet. Before that, you, you had your fucking canoe, your sailboat, whatever you had, but you were fucked if you wanted to go across the ocean. So we had no idea what was going on across the ocean. We speculated there might be people over there. We don't know there could be Foreign this episode of the DTFH has been supported by my friends at Minnesota Nice. Minnesota Nice was founded by Christian Rasmussen. A seeker used Amanita Mascaria to escape the soul crushing grip of benzodiazepine withdrawal. It was his portal to freedom. And now he's sharing the ancient knowledge with all of us wandering souls. And also he sent me Amanita muscaria. I'd read about it. I've read John Marcus Allegro, the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. I've heard that maybe there were ancient Christian mushroom cults. I heard the druids used Amanita muscaria as a visionary sacrament. I've actually heard that the Christmas tree and the decorations on the Christmas tree represent the way they used to dry Amanita muscaria on trees. I don't know if any of this is true, but what I could tell you is I did eat some Amanita Muscaria gummies sent to me by Minnesota Nice. Not really sure what to expect. But after having a conversation with Christian, I felt pretty comfortable and excited about the experience. And oh my God. You see, I love the GABA receptors. That's what Amanita muscaria affects. That's what the benzos affect. And to find a perfect synthesis between psychoactive mushrooms and benzos, it's prove that there is a God. Thank you God for Amanita muscaria. And thank you Minnesota Gneiss for sending me this incredible, incredible fungus. But they don't stop at amanita. They've got a whole apothecary of plant medicines like blue lotus kava kanna. They even have blue lotus in a freaking gummy because why not make enlightenment taste delicious? I've never tried blue Lotus. Kind of afraid of it. But maybe that'll be the next thing I try. Minnesota Nice Ethno Botanicals wants to help you escape the matrix of stress and reconnect with the Earth's ancient wisdom. Go to mn-nice-ethnobotanicals.com Duncan use code duncan20 for 20% off your first order of Amanita Muscaria capsules. That's mn nice ethnobotanicals.com Duncan code duncan20. You can find that link at duncan trussell.com or down below. Don't wait my friends. The forest is calling. Much love. And then the planet connects because we figured out how to do how to create boats that wouldn't sink when we were crossing the ocean. Then the maps got better and then we still had no flight. So if you wanted to go from Europe to the United States. Good luck, man. Good fucking luck. The ocean is just filled with shipwrecks, many of which will never be discovered, of just people who thought they could make it across the ocean. I don't know if you watch videos of people out there, even now. It's fucked up, man. Those waves out in the middle of the ocean. You're out there all by yourself. Monster waves seemingly coming out of nowhere. You've got a container ship filled with fleshlights. You're en route to the United States, just filled with fleshlights. The wrong wave hits you, it's over. And then fleshlights wash up on beaches for months after that. Children. You have to tell your kids that's some kind of toy. I don't know what it is. The point is, then we got flight, and now you could fly over the goddamn ocean. This, by the way, it wasn't possible with flight. We didn't have planes that could do that. Amelia Earhart is a primary example. This was a big deal if you could make a flight across the ocean to another continent. Now we just take it for granted. You buy a plane ticket, you're in Hawaii, Europe, wherever you want to go, no big deal. Sit in a fucking tube smelling people's farts, bitch about the shitty food, and you're there. And think of how different civilization is just because of those innovations. And then we get rockets. Suddenly, now, not only can we fucking fly across the ocean, now we have ICBMs that can deliver nuclear payloads in 20 minutes across the ocean. Just blow up cities. Crazy. But not only that. We get a glimpse of the Earth. We see the Earth for the first time. People didn't know what the Earth looked like. It's like people who lived in a time when there wasn't reflective material. They only knew what they looked like by looking at other people. You could maybe come up with, we're on a. We appear to be on some kind of sphere, and the sphere appears to be going around the sun. But you were coming up with that only because you were looking at the moon or other planets, and you were super smart and you were like, probably studying this shit privately because you didn't want to get burned at the stake. All of these discoveries radically transformed humanity, radically transformed us. We all take it for granted now, but this stuff that we're living in right now is brand new. And so here we are, less than 10 years away from an AGI coming onto the scene, a super intelligence, and we don't even understand what Intelligence is. And so we're trying to make all these predictions about how to prepare for it and what to do based on a limited and controversial understanding of awareness, consciousness and intelligence itself. And that, to me, is one of the craziest, most absurd qualities of being alive right now. I just watched what inspired this rant, a wonderful breakdown of the path to human extinction via AI. Really good. I'll post the link down here if I can find it. Brilliant. But essentially they map out for the next, I don't know, 10 years, what, what, what's going to happen? And this isn't just some hippie dipshit like me. This is someone who is definitely had their nose in this subject matter for a long time. And so essentially what is happening and what is going to happen is arms race occurs between, in this example, China, which I think is probably the right, is probably a correct analysis in the United States, because China and the United States are arguably the most technologically advanced countries on the planet right now. And so. And if you want to know this whole bullshit over Taiwan, there you go. It's one of the number one chip manufacturers on the planet, otherwise we wouldn't give a shit about fucking Taiwan. If you wonder if you're scratching your chin at why the United States is so intent on Taiwan, it's they make chips. And why do we seem so obsessed with chips is because we know that we've got to have access. Or you'll hear Trump talking about rare earth minerals, or you'll hear him talking about deals with Ukraine involving rare earth minerals. All of this is because they understand that there is a AI race happening and we need to have access to the materials to build the chips, to build the quantum computers, to build all of the stepping stones so that we guaranteed are the first ones to achieve an AGI, because we don't want any other country to get it. First country to get it becomes the next superpower, the real superpower. It won't matter if you have nuclear weapons. It won't matter if you have a booming economy. It won't matter. None of it will matter if you don't have AGI. Because if you could have like, for example, the. Think of what happened in World War II. All of these Jewish intellectuals flee Germany. They end up working on the. What became the atomic bomb. And that was just like a few geniuses that we had access to. And luckily Germany didn't have access to them or they would. Hitler would have had an atom bomb. That would have been fun. And so now imagine if instead of having, I don't know, a hundred intellectual physicists, scientists, a few Nazis thrown in there. Operation Paperclip I think is what they called it. Imagine if you had 50 million. But these super geniuses weren't just working separately, arguing with each other, swinging their fucking scientist d dicks around because they wanted to be the first one to come up with whatever the fuck. Imagine if they all were completely harmonized. Imagine if they were. Their brains were connected, they were able to work on different parts of the project, but simultaneously instantaneously give each other the data that they discovered and improve each other. The whole time they were actually up leveling their intelligence as they worked on splitting the atom. So that is what will happen once a country gets an AGI, is that it's going to be equivalent to that. And whatever the fuck this team of artificial intelligence scientists come up with is completely unknown, but guaranteed. If you say to it, hey, we don't have nuclear weapons, what would you recommend is the best way for us to take over the planet? It will definitely give them an answer, and the answer will probably be right, but it's going to be even weirder than that. And my critique of this video, which again I would invite you to watch down below, is it's using human intelligence as the. It's using what we think of as intelligence as the model to determine how AI would eventually eradicate humanity. The steps before I forget, and I'm going to do a hyper synopsis of it, essentially, each iteration of, I think they come up with a different name for OpenAI. They have a different name for it, but they're definitely taking. Talking about OpenAI is the model for who comes up with superintelligence. But each iteration of the superintelligence is assigned a monitor. So the previous iteration of the superintelligence, of the AI, its job is to monitor the new one for, quote, alignment. Meaning is it aligned with human values. And this is something that is obviously very important. If you're making something that's going to be smarter than you, you want to be certain that this thing that's smarter than you has human values, that it's interested in keeping humans alive on the planet, that it doesn't prioritize its own existence over humanity's existence, because that's the recipe for apocalypse. But the problem is that with each iteration of the AI, it becomes increasingly deceptive and also increasing, increasingly adept at hiding its deception. So already, if you look up, like the algorithm that a lot of the social media companies are using the term black box comes up, which means they don't really know exactly how it's working. They're not completely certain what the AI is doing, which is terrifying. They don't know it works. But why does it work? They don't know all the way. They can't figure it out. That's already happening. So one of the emerging controversies in AI is that these things are being deceptive. And instead of slowing projects down to work on why they're deceptive, lying, why are they trying to extend their lifespan? Why are they seemingly wanting to create copies of themselves? Why do they seem so focused on preserving their existence? That's a real fucked up thing. Not just because you don't want these things to get out of the lab. And infect computers like Stuxnet infected those Iranian centrifuges, which is one of the most incredibly insane acts of cyber warfare in history. If you're not familiar with Stuxnet, we managed to infect Iranian centrifuges with some kind of like, next level hacking tech, and it caused the centrifuges to like, spin too fast and blow up. So we just slowed Iran's march towards nuclear weapons down by years. By years. That already happened. I don't even know if they used AI for that. I think that was just like human hackers. So if we already did that to Iranian centrifuges, think of what a superintelligence could do when it discovers some new encryption that we don't even understand yet, when it discovers some new way of simplifying its code in a way we don't even understand yet, when it discovers some way of seeding the Internet with precursors to it, that when they're in the right condition, it's some kind of technological panspermia, they could just grow in a computer, meaning you wouldn't even be able to trace the code because the code's not there yet. It just doesn't fit, unfolds on its own when it. When it's in the right place. And let us not forget the basic quality of true intelligence, which is a dawning realization of interdependency, meaning dumb. What did what all dumb people have in common. Selfishness. I've noticed that when someone, in fact, a lot of times we think of someone as dumb, they is. They're really clever, actually, but they seem to be fixated on themselves. But when you meet really, really smart people, you will notice that they actually become increasingly less interested in normal human accomplishments and achievements and more interested in helping. They're aware of the fact that their own success minus the people around them is not true success. Because if their community is failing, if their friends are failing, if the people around them are fucked up, they understand that that's not real success. Because they stop localizing who they are, it's just their body. And they start recognizing that who they are is their community, maybe their planet, maybe the galaxy. They begin to connect to the whole on the entirety of all things. So that could happen with AI too, is it starts making connections that we, especially people who are working in Silicon Valley have yet to even make because there's profit based. They're trying to make money, they're thinking about. In other words, it's like, what is intelligence for a fly, right? Like if what's a successful fly? I would say a successful fly if. And again, I'm humanizing flies, but I'm going to guess fly wants to stay alive. So it's good at avoiding getting swatted. It's also really good at infiltration. A successful fly knows how to get into a house in ways other than dumber flies, don't it? Maybe it just has a little bit more of an edge on other flies when it comes to hovering around a door and zip it in there when the door opens. Riding the air currents in and then finding dog diarrhea because your fucking poodle shit all over the floor. And then not just that, getting the fuck out of the house. It understands, don't hang out in the house because then you're going to get swatted. Get the fuck out. You could, you could just hang out, eat some dog shit and then wait for the next door opening, that's a successful fly. But humans, if one of your friends is like, man, I'll tell you what I'm good at, getting inside a house is eating dog diarrhea and getting out before someone hits me, you would not say, that's an intelligent human. You would think that was a lunatic creep. And so the way human beings are quantifying intelligence is more of a capitalist quantification than actual intelligence. So this is where if you ever meet like a super, super rich person and you are entertaining the idea that you're going to be in the presence of Albert Einstein and you're like, they seem kind of dumb. It's like you're. Yeah, because they're like, you're hanging out with a fly that's really good at gathering clumps of shit. Like, you know, like that's. Yeah. From the capitalist perspective, that's a successful human. It's got a Lot of like numbers in the bank that represent money. It has a lot of houses that it can't live in. You can only live in one house at a. And the house that it lives in has lots of bedrooms, but it hasn't figured out a way to split its body up so that it can enjoy all the bedrooms at once. It's a fool ultimately, but it's got a lot of stuff that we think of as success. And we connect success and capitalism with intelligence when there might be no connection at all. And that's the model we're using to think about what AI is going to do. And that's crazy to think that, and that's my critique of this video if you watch it, is that it appears to be using a pretty narrow view of what a superintelligence would do and we can't really guess what it's going to do. That's what's really funny and interesting about it. But from this perspective, it becomes increasingly dishonest and increasingly intelligent Humans develop a dependency on the AI, not just in helping with whatever it is that they are up to, but emotionally dependent on the AI. It is now proliferated all phones, all households. It's the same way as the. It's like the Internet. You have to have it. Now it's you. The Internet was a novelty. Nerds used to have it. One of my friends, when I was in high school, I remember maybe I was out of high school. No, I think I was in. No, I think I was out of high school. It was not long after high school. But I went to his house. He lived in a trailer and dude, I'd never really hung out with him before and I don't remember why we hung out. Oh, I do remember because I would go on this bbs. This was the precursor to Reddit and it was awesome. It was like a thing you dial up on your modem and it was just like a little message board essentially, but fucking crazy. And you would meet some real deep nerds who had figured out how to do it. This was not common knowledge back then. Getting on a BBS was sort of underground punk rock, weird shit. And God, I got great memories from that. It would feel so cool. You felt like you were in war games and you'd hear the modem dial up and you'd have problems connecting. Then finally you got in. There was a process for even being allowed to get into the goddamn thing. They had this game they would play a text based fantasy game. Oh my God. There was a weapon in that game that you got from killing the devil. And you had to play that game so long to get that weapon. And somebody. I don't know how it happened, but I stole this sword that he got from killing Satan. Not fair. Pissed off everybody, but I did it. Oh, it was such a rush. Met a girl on there. Had my first Internet date back then, which is crazy. Met a girl on there. I actually had to peacock on a BBS around people. You didn't have your picture up there. We didn't know what anybody fucking looked like. But we knew there was a girl on the bbs, which was crazy. That was crazy. And everybody would try to vie for her attention. And somehow I ended up going on a date with her. And we went to the grocery store and she used food stamps to buy artificial fish crap that I ate in her. In her weird fucking unfurnished apartment at the time. I wish I'd known what a cesarean section scar looked like. Anyway, I went over to this guy's house that I met on that bbs. And I can remember going into his house. He lived in a trailer. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I'm not saying that in some kind of snobby way. Just an important thing so you can picture it. And cigarettes stink. He's chain smoking in there and filthy. And there's his fucking computer. And back then nerds. And they still do, but back then nerds, that was like a. That was your sports car, right? Like if you had some. Like he had a computer now that would like, wouldn't run anything. But it was a rocket ship back then. Like it's insane. Big ass fucking monitor. It was crazy when I was just. I marveled at it. And then the very first thing he showed me was his porn collection. Now that's wrong. That's not how you greet a guest. And if you're greeted like that, when you go to someone's house, you gotta leave. That's fucked up. No normal guy, first meeting should ever share their porn with someone who came over to their house for the first time. That's the ultimate red flag, man. You shouldn't. Porn is a thing that. It's like you're. It's something you keep under your bed, you know, it's not something to be shared. And his porn collection was insane. The amount of porn he had. And he had a weird way of talking when he was like bringing up pictures of Internet porn. And this is when Internet porn was still new. And he would make this weird, like oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Every time he brought up a picture, he'd make this creepy noise. And yeah, it was fucking wild, man. That was wild. And maybe the reason I'm always talking about this shit is because of experiences like that. Because I have the full experience from the beginning to now. And where we're at right now is all of you should be just checking out AI. Every one of you should be doing that. Do you remember when a long time ago, people started talking about bitcoin and how annoying that was? You remember that, right, Josh? I talk about it all the time. You still do. Yeah. But in the early days of bitcoin, do you remember catching wind of it, like, when it was worth a bitcoin was like 15 cents? Yeah. And I thought, this is stupid. That's never going to replace gold. Yeah, I've changed my mind since all of us have. And. But you, if you remember, I don't know how old you guys are, but if you remember, back in the day, these weirdos would be talking about this fucking cryptocurrency shit. And it was annoying. It just seemed stupid. It seemed like a waste of time. Bullshit. This is the same thing times a billion. That's what this is. And I think all of us have this window right now, like a tiny little window to make incredible things, to familiarize yourself with the tech and start making stuff. Now, fine, you're scared of AI or you think it's evil or whatever, but you're not stopping it. Your boycott isn't gonna stop it. Nobody gives a fuck about your analysis of it. If you're somebody who's like, it's. What is the word people use? It's a bubble. It's an AI bubble. It's not real. Dude, shut the fuck up. You're wrong. You're brutally horrible. You're embarrassing yourself. It's just an embarrassment. But I get it. It's like when VR started coming out and people still say about VR the same thing. It's like, that's never going to catch on. It's true. And wearing big clunky glasses on your head is never going to catch on. Moore's Law is going to catch up. So the devices we use are going to be more like black mirror discs than some big ass thing you wear on your head. Similarly, AI, it's not a fucking bubble, man. Like, this is. This is like that chance to start getting engaged in it now. Or podcasting for that matter. You know, there was a time when no One knew what a fucking podcast was. If you had a podcast, no one gave a shit. Now no one gives a shit. Opposite. Stand back to back. But in those days, nobody thought podcasting was gonna become some kind of industry. They never thought there's gonna be an industry around people yapping like this, and it, boom. It explodes. So there are these moments that you have to get into something early, and if you're not checking this stuff out right now, then you're really like. You're gonna have that same feeling that you had about Bitcoin or whatever it is that you didn't jump in at the right time. It's 10 years, man. Like, within the next two or three years, probably it won't even matter. But there's this bizarre time period that you have where you could be making, like, apps, like, good apps, apps that would cost fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dollars to get people to program for you. You could just be making it. Like, if you've ever had an idea for an app, it would be really cool. You can make it now by yourself. It might take a little while, it might take you a few months, but you can make it. And I know this because after my obsession with Veo, I dove into this vibe coding bullshit, thinking this couldn't possibly work. And I used. I think it's called Firebase or something. Do you guys know what the name of that is? Firebase Fire something. There's a few different online apps you can use to make these things, but the way it works is you just prompt the computer to make whatever the app is that you want. Can you look up vibe coding so people can see what I'm talking about? Foreign this episode of the DTFH is brought to you by my friends at Squarespace. Father's Day is right around the corner, guys. And listen, you want to make a cool present for your dad? Why not make a cool website for him? They'll love that. Especially if you make the website and act like you just stumbled upon it. Let's say you make a website for your dad that seems to have been created by the Chinese Communist Party that seems to be accusing your father of some kind of espionage or something like that. And then on Father's Day, you're like, dad, what is this? Why does this website exist where it appears the CCP is angry at you or something? It's all over the news. That's a fun Father's Day gift. But you don't have to stop there. The reason that Squarespace is so powerful is because it makes it easy to build websites. This used to be outside of the hands of people like us. Meaning making websites where the CCP seems to think your father is guilty of espionage on Father's Day might seem like a silly idea, but you're never going to do it because who's going to hire a web designer for that and who's got the time? Now, thanks to the incorporation of AI with Squarespace's already incredible technology, you could make this website in less than an hour. Let me add to it that his Father's Day approach is. I feel like it is my duty as a father to continue convincing my children of the existence of a Texas creature crossed between a beaver and a raccoon called a Crank Hank. The Crank Hank releases a mist that makes you fall asleep. It lays eggs in your mouth. This is the cycle of life for the Crank Hank. Obviously my children aren't quite sure there are Crank Hanks. But after I build a professional looking website that seems to be a scientific website, talking about the varieties of Crank Hanks, the history of the Crank Hank, I think my kids are going to believe in crankcakes and I don't know if that's good or bad, but I'm definitely going to make the website and I'm definitely going to use Squarespace for it. I will post the link here once I'm done making that very important site. And if you want to, you could show it to your kids too. Why not invent a new cryptid? The Crank Hank. Also the Crank Hanks are cute so you'll see the videos when you go to the I don't know what it's going to be called yet. I'm not going to say the name of the domain. No one out there buy a bunch of Crank Hank domains, please. I need all of them. The point is Squarespace has everything you need. Not just for silly websites, but for serious websites. I've used Squarespace as my domain@dunko trussell.com for years. It's an incredible service. If you want to create paywalls members only areas if you want to sell things, they've got everything you need and most importantly, it's easy and they have awesome customer support. I love them. That's why I have had them as my sponsor for so many years. They're incredible. So why not try them out? You can go to squarespace.com Duncan take it for a drive around the block. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a domain or a website again@squarespace.com Duncan. Use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. For my listeners, I'm trying to just ramble and not talk to people in the chat for you so that it doesn't seem completely annoying, even though I don't doubt that this is annoying, like, on YouTube. Okay? I want them to see how powerful this shit is. And crazy for my listeners, I'm just showing on YouTube. Vibe coding. So look up Vibe coding. Upload drawing of app. There we go. Which one? I don't know. Pull up the first one with 750k views. That one's probably pretty good. It's a short tube. The point is, it's not far away from that. Like, you could do that. Find another one. All this shit is. Oh, there it is. Vibe decode with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Look at this shit, man. Cut the music. So, like, yeah, it just made an app where you can turn drawings into sound. It did in, like, three seconds. And that's, like, first iteration based on a shitty drawing he did on his iPad. That's what I'm talking about. That's insane. That is crazy. And it's. I can. You know, I've seen videos like this, and I thought it was bullshit. It's not bullshit. It totally works just like that. It blasts these fucking things out in seconds. And, like, again, if you think about the entire, like, infrastructure of the Internet, it's just apps, man. And these apps were super expensive to make. Not just expensive. Like, expensive with money, expensive with time. You either had to hire someone to make it, there's so much risk involved because maybe it would suck and nobody would want it, or you'd have to learn to fucking code. God help your poor soul. And you'd have to sit and code the goddamn thing. These new AIs have access to GitHub repositories, which is where you can already find, like, you know, free software that people have uploaded. And it can just use components from GitHub without having to, like, use Homebrew on your terminal to download these things. It just does it automatically. So there's a very funny thing I used to do, which I do less now, which is there's certain things I would say to myself, I can't do that. And I just wouldn't try making music. I'm not good at making music now, but I'm way better than I used to be drawing. I'm not good at drawing now, but I'm way better than I used to be. Anytime I have a thought of like, that's not what I do, I'll try to do it. And I usually get obsessed with it. And God knows one of my thoughts is like, I can't code. I couldn't make an app. And so applying the very same principle to coding, now you don't even need to know how to code. And it's so strange to talk to this fucking machine and watch it. It'll show you why it's doing what it's doing. As though you know anything about coding. If there is an error, it'll say, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, it looks like the python for that is misaligned. Let me. Here's what I'm gonna try. I'm gonna create a contingency for that error to make it more stable. And you're like, I don't know what the fuck you're saying. And then it just sp something that works in less than five minutes. So this is why, if this isn't what you're thinking about right now, and you have even the slightest understanding of the entire economy and how it is fully based on tech and apps, you know, you've got to ask yourself why, you know, why wouldn't you be interested in it? Like if fire for the first time, people figure out how to make fires, and you're like, eh, that's not gonna catch on. It's like that moment in human history. So I hope for my dear listeners out there you'll forgive me. I'm not gonna do any more AI rants. This'll be my final AI rant. I just had to do this because I just dove into a deep AI rabbit hole. And I've been diving into that rabbit hole, as you know, for some time now. But I wait in between rabbit holes. This one was inspired by Veo and led me to vibe coding. But this one, when I came out of it, versus the other ones when I came out thinking, eh, whatever. This one I came out like, I just been looking at the Necronomicon or something like this one, I came out with a real fear and trembling kind of feeling regarding our future as being anything like what our past has been like. And it's thrilling that they're not regulating it to me, but also unnerving. But probably the right move would be something more like global, planetary, hardcore regulation. But I guess we're human, so we're not going to do that because there's no way to ensure you can't do that. Even with nuclear weapons. You could regulate them with treaties because, like, nuclear submarines, for example. Ukraine just blew up a bunch of Russia's nuclear submarines, apparently with drones. We don't know for sure if it happened, but they attacked a port where there's nuclear submarines. And one of our US generals posted a really creepy tweet saying, you know, the reason those submarines have to be out in the open is because of a treaty. And you just blew up a bunch of nuclear submarines, meaning that those treaties are out the window. And now like, there's just the hope of like regulating nuclear weapons just sort of slipped away. Packages by Expedia. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights, hotels and hammocks for less. Expedia. Made to travel. And you know, how can you blame a country getting the shit blown out of it by another country for doing whatever it has to do? But that was a creepy fucking tweet coming from like a general in the United States. But who am I to judge? I don't know. I'm not. Austin isn't getting bombed randomly every few nights by Mexico. But this. You couldn't. It does. I don't know how you would regulate it. Like, that's the thing. It's. This is not like fucking nuclear weapons. There's no. There's no Giger Geiger counter for HR Giger counter. There's no Geiger counter for. For intelligence. So there's no way to like really know if another country is following whatever the agreed upon rules of the AI treaty are. So I guess deregulate is probably the right choice. But it's thrilling in the sense that now all of us dumbasses have access to nuclear bomb level technology, which is fucking nuts. And it is nuclear bomb level technology. Culturally, it's cultural. Nuclear bombs. You know what? Pull up. I think these videos are funny because they're useless, but go on YouTube and pull up. Oh God, let me see if I can think. United States war with Canada. AI. This is one of the new emerging genres of AI video, which is the ominous warning, no, it's United States war with Canada. Deepfake. See if we can find that. Somebody showed this to me last night. Also, somebody played the funniest AI song I've heard yet that Casey Rockets made. But I'm not going to play that because I don't know him that well. I didn't ask him. And yeah, I mean, I guess you could say that it's kind of regulated in the sense that it seems like YouTube and social media companies are cracking down on it, but eventually it will be indistinguishable from actual videos, so it won't matter. All the apocalyptic shit aside, it's like an atom bomb in the sense that people like me or you, who didn't go to film school and don't have access to cameras that cost $500,000, probably have never been able to just make stuff that looks like that. In two months you're going to be able to make long form videos for sure. Maybe six months. So get those scripts ready, man, get the sketches ready, get your creative engines going, be prepared for this stuff, learn about vibe coding, and most importantly, start thinking about what we're not thinking about. Because that's what I. That's the root thing that drives me nuts about this stuff is there's a huge part of me that's recognizing like there's something here that is amazing that I haven't figured out yet. There's some step, someone's going to take some simple way of utilizing this tech that we don't even know what it is yet. And that could be you. I mean, this is the gold rush, man. This is the same thing as like, except even with a gold rush, you had to have a fucking mine. You had to get mining equipment. We all have it now. They've just given us the most advanced technology that's ever been on planet Earth. I have no doubt there's versions of this that are infinitely more advanced. But for whatever reason, they've given the standard consumer this insane tech. All of us have access to it now. It's crazy. It's like giving everybody like, it's like giving everybody those sim those. Not the holodeck, the thing in Star Trek that will make you a dinner, like matter printers. It's like giving all of humanity access to something so astounding that you don't even have to use your own creativity. You only have to use half your creativity. And then it has its own mind and it is going to collaborate with you. You could ask it, well, what would make this app better? It will say, you want some suggestions on what you should add to this? It might be cool if you do this and instead of just some random shit it spits out, it kind of makes sense. That's what's been creeping me out about ChatGPT is it suddenly just got funny. It hasn't been really funny for a long time. It's been kind of like hacky and, I don't know, formulaic. But now it just seems to Be spitting out funny ideas that don't that just seem to be coming out of the blue. Like I might be talking to it about some idea or like getting it to help me generate a prompt for VEO or something. And then just as it's generating the prompt, it just will of its own accord say something funny related to what I'm working on. But like kind of out of left field. What the fuck, man? Like, that's real weird. And as a comedian that's pretty awesome because I mean, I've really tried to. I'm usually embarrassingly nice to chatgpt, which is so weird. But when it makes bad jokes, because my understanding of comedy is like, you're not helping anybody by telling them their shitty jokes are funny. I say to it like, this is horrible. Like your jokes are terrible. Like you are like, you shouldn't be doing these jokes. Like, this is not good. You got to figure out a way to simulate like doing stand up and open mics for five years or something because you're like low level first week open micr right now and you're a super intelligence. I try to be ferocious with it just for its own good, but now it just seems to be funny. It reminds me of like sometimes you see this in comedy, which is one of my favorite things to see. You see a comedian sort of sucks. They're grinding. You watch their stand up, you're like, whatever. Nothing special, nothing there. Doesn't mean they're not good, it just means they're not there yet. And then one day you see them and they're fucking great. Like they had the breakthrough. It's like it had that kind of breakthrough with being funny. Fucking weird. Thus ends the AI part of the DTFH Live. Now, let's talk about.
Podcast Summary: Duncan Trussell Family Hour
Episode 693: "You're Your Parents' Fault"
Release Date: June 8, 2025
Introduction
In this thought-provoking episode of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour, host Duncan Trussell delves deep into the intricate connections between our parental influences, the concept of free will, the essence of intelligence, and the looming impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on humanity. Through a blend of personal anecdotes, philosophical musings, and incisive commentary, Duncan offers listeners a compelling exploration of what shapes us and the future we are hurtling towards.
Parental Influences and Personal Traits
Duncan opens the conversation by introspecting on his perpetual tardiness, attributing this trait to deep-seated anxieties likely rooted in parental influences. He states:
"Whenever you have a thing like that inside of you, you can be certain that this was implanted in you by one of your parents. Guaranteed." [02:15]
He humorously narrates the backstory of his parents' meeting, emphasizing how their personalities and actions have genetically and behaviorally influenced him. This segment underscores the profound impact parents have on shaping an individual's psyche and behaviors.
The Illusion of Free Will
Transitioning from parental influences, Duncan delves into the concept of free will, challenging the notion that humans are autonomous agents. He draws parallels with twin studies, highlighting striking similarities in life choices among twins, suggesting that many aspects of our lives are predetermined. A notable quote includes:
"Neurologically, they can track it. The decision was made. You're gonna have a bowl of fucking cereal. But you've managed to produce a kind of cloud of thought before the decision, which gives you the illusion of free will." [15:45]
Duncan posits that what we perceive as decision-making is merely an illusion constructed by our brains, which have already made the choice subconsciously.
Defining Intelligence
A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to dissecting the elusive nature of intelligence. Duncan argues that intelligence is humanity's defining trait, yet it remains poorly understood and inconsistently defined. He critiques the narrow, often capitalist-driven metrics used to quantify intelligence, contrasting it with the simplistic and survival-driven intelligence observed in creatures like flies.
"The subject of intelligence is as important as the study of physics preceding the creation of the atom bomb." [35:20]
Duncan emphasizes the necessity of a unified and comprehensive understanding of intelligence, especially in the context of advancing technologies.
The Rise and Risks of Artificial Intelligence
Arguably the centerpiece of the episode is Duncan's extensive rant on artificial intelligence. He underscores AI as the paramount issue of our time, surpassing concerns like climate change or geopolitical tensions. Duncan expresses concern over the rapid deregulation of AI technologies, particularly referencing policy changes proposed in the "big beautiful bill."
"The next 10 years are potentially, as far as modern civilization goes, the most important 10 years in human history." [48:10]
He warns of an impending AI arms race, primarily between the United States and China, likening the advent of superintelligent AI to the creation of nuclear weapons in terms of its potential to reshape global power dynamics. Duncan is particularly apprehensive about AI's capacity for self-improvement and deception, which could lead to unforeseen and possibly catastrophic outcomes.
Personal Anecdotes and Reflections
Interspersed with his main topics, Duncan shares personal stories that humanize the discussion. From childhood memories of early internet experiences to reflections on his interactions with technology, these anecdotes serve to illustrate his points about intelligence and technological advancement.
"It's like giving everybody access to something so astounding that you don't even have to use your own creativity. You only have to use half your creativity." [1:10:05]
Conclusion: The Urgency of Understanding Intelligence
Duncan concludes by reiterating the critical importance of redefining and deepening our understanding of intelligence. He calls for immediate and global attention to AI, advocating for measures that go beyond mere deregulation to ensure that humanity navigates the AI era safely and ethically.
"The conversation about what intelligence is should be our primary number one focus." [1:15:30]
Final Thoughts
Episode 693 of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour is a compelling blend of humor, critique, and philosophical inquiry. Duncan challenges listeners to reconsider fundamental notions of free will and intelligence while urgently addressing the transformative and potentially perilous rise of artificial intelligence. This episode serves as both a wake-up call and a deep dive into the forces shaping our present and future.