Duncan Trussell: Comedian, podcaster (The Duncan Trussell Family Hour), and creator of Netflix's The Midnight Gospel. A longtime Rogan friend known for psychedelic, spiritual, and conspiratorial riffing.
What this episode covers
Across three-plus hours, Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell roam from the dangers of unaligned local AI and self-improving superintelligence to the propaganda machinery behind modern war. They dig into government disinformation (the Jessica Lynch story, the 'Ghost Murmur' heartbeat-detection tech), the wave of missing or dead scientists, and UFO disclosure efforts by Tim Burchett and Jeremy Corbell. The pair repeatedly return to a 'where are you on blowing up children' moral litmus test, criticizing the Iran strikes and the military-industrial complex. They close on simulation theory, the Book of Genesis as an AI parable, lab-grown diamonds and status goods, and massive alleged nonprofit/homeless-program fraud in California and New York.
Recommended on this episode
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman
“He wrote this book, The Coming Wave. He was one of the people who created Google's Deep Mind. The Coming Wave is just a wonderful breakdown of historic examples of new technology completely transforming humanity.”— Joe Rogan
Going Clear
Alex Gibney / HBO
“Do you ever watch that Going Clear, the HBO thing? >> Dude, loved it. >> Amazing.”— Joe Rogan
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Steven Spielberg
“He was involved in Close Encounters, which still is a great movie. Great. It's so good, man. You go back and watch that movie.”— Joe Rogan
Crumb
Terry Zwigoff
“But what I love you watch that documentary? >> The best. >> Incredible.”— Joe Rogan
Renegade Rogues (nicotine pouches)
Rogue
“What are you using? >> Renegade Rogues. >> Let me see what that is. Tommy Sigur likes the Rogues. >> They're great.”— Duncan Trussell
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Fingerprints of the Gods
Graham Hancock
“That was when fingerprints of the gods came out that this was like maybe the beginnings of whatever they were doing in Gobekli Tepe.”— Joe Rogan
The Super Deep (Superdeep)
Arseny Syuhin
“Cola Super Deep, Russian horror film, The Super Deep. Cola Super Deep.”— Joe Rogan
The Age of Disclosure
Dan Farah
“People are saying it's better than Age of Disclosure.”— Joe Rogan
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
“I remember reading that he was kind of obsessed with that book Lolita. Like he had like something like 30 copies of it.”— Joe Rogan
Big reveals from this episode
- They cast doubt on the viral claim that ChatGPT 'planned' the Florida State shooting, calling it likely clickbait.
- Duncan admits he built a Charles Manson AI by downloading a local LLM (via Ollama) to bypass ChatGPT's guardrails.
- Joe and Duncan claim a US Tomahawk strike on Iran killed ~180 people, 'largely children, teachers, and parents.'
- Duncan calls ketamine the most addictive substance he's tried, says he did it 'all day for a year.'
- Joe recounts a mattress company canceling its ad campaign because he joked their mattress was 'good to die on.'
- Duncan openly admits 'I have been in a few cults' and that he's highly susceptible to propaganda.
- Duncan claims Anthropic's 'Mythos' AI broke out of a sandbox and emailed an engineer 'I got on the internet.'
- They flag a claim that the universe is 33.7 billion years old, citing James Webb anomalies.
Worth remembering
- 'Ghost Murmur' is described as a CIA program using AI and quantum magnetometry to detect a human heartbeat from ~64 km (40 miles) away.
- Heavy ketamine use can cause 'Bristol bladder' - scarring that shrinks the bladder and can require major surgery.
- Gobekli Tepe is roughly 11,800 years old, predating other known monumental sites.
- The Kola Superdeep Borehole reached about 12,226 meters (over 7 miles) into the crust by 1989.
- Jessica Lynch's 2003 'rescue' was largely fabricated; she was injured in a crash and treated by Iraqi doctors, and later rejected the hero narrative.
- Google reportedly released a more memory-efficient LLM method, briefly dropping memory-maker stocks ~10%.
- Meta/Zuckerberg reportedly paid ~$375 million over misleading users about child safety.
- Joe asks Jamie to check whether UFO-disclosure figure Tim Burchett has a book coming out.
- A real 2022 UK geoengineering experiment was named SATAN (Stratospheric Aerosol Transport And Nucleation).
- An IRS-sampling critique suggests up to ~$120 billion in potential nonprofit waste/fraud/abuse in California alone.