Duncan Trussell

The episode opens as filler. Duncan Trussell and the host are waiting for Graham Hancock, who is coming from a seminar in Orange County that they put at least an hour away. Trussell describes a frightening drive in, saying his GPS sent him somewhere that looked like "the surface of the moon." That leads to a question about why people assume someone living alone in the wilderness must be up to something sinister. The host's example is a lone cabin with a smoking chimney: "What the fuck are they cooking in there?"

The host then describes a VBS.tv episode, which he hesitates to call a documentary, about a man who has lived for about 20 years in a one-room shack in northeastern Alaska with his wife. Supplies are dropped off to them. According to the host, the man never saw the 9/11 footage and had only heard that something had happened. The host relays the man's own explanation: "He says that hunting and gathering is what keeps you happy, and that's what keeps him happy." The episode also shows him chasing down and shooting a bear at night after it came too close to the house, because bears kill their dogs.

The two disagree about how to read this. The host says the life "seems so horrifying to us" but that to the man, ordinary life looks mundane. Trussell pushes back: "I don't think it's horrifying. I think it sounds amazing." What appeals to him is self-sufficiency, being able to "know that if everything fell apart, your life would barely shift at all."

The host asks whether that urge is a resistance to joining the system, and calls it ridiculous. His argument is that society is impressive "because millions of people contributed to make this one colossal thing that relies on millions of people." He grants that it has "some terrible parts about it too" but says the idea and what it can achieve are amazing. He wonders why anyone would want to keep open the option to simply leave.

Trussell compares this to a common objection to monasticism: that monks ignore society, and whatever they learn in isolation is "not applicable to people in the world." He suggests some monks simply don't care whether they contribute. He then acts out both sides. The worldly critic lists what the monk misses, including "muscle cars," "great movies" and "killer restaurants." The monk answers that the critic is missing astral projection and "pure transcendent bliss."

The host jokes that a monk who could talk like that should tour and would recruit monks "left and right." Trussell turns this into a point about renunciation itself. He stresses that "this is purely theoretical," then suggests that as practitioners progress, they lose the desire to perform or show off. He compares it to zooming far out on Google Maps. His broader claim, also framed as theory, is that outsiders get renunciates wrong.

the assumption when someone becomes a renunciate, I think, is that they're not experiencing happiness. Right, right. When it may be that the thing that they're experiencing is a million times better than what they were experiencing in the world.

The host offers his own experience as evidence that ordinary practice can change consciousness. The night before his first appearance on the Howard Stern show, he was nervous and couldn't sleep in his New York hotel room. He did poses from "this ancient yoga book" for about an hour and a half. Afterward he says he felt high and tingly, with a "glowing tingle," and that his ability to tune into his surroundings was "just cranked to 10." He is deliberately loose about what to call this: chakras, senses, or "whatever the fuck it is you want to call it."