JRQE #4 - Duncan Trussell

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You know what's really crazy? That your mom, after that one of your stepdads was gay. Isn't that like an interesting sort of a snap back from that? She was probably around this crazy guy with guns. It's like, get the fuck. Give me a gay guy. I'll take it. That's what my mom did. My dad was like this really violent cop, and she married a hippie. Like, when she broke up with him. My stepfather had long hair until I was like 15 years old. He had like, a ponytail. He was a total complete hippie. Crazy stoner, architect. Yeah, well, he was snapback.

You don't want to date Hunter S. Thompson. You don't want to be around that.

Was that your dad, Hunter S. Thompson shooting shit?

Yeah, still is.

He still traveled around in RV just seeing the world.

Yeah, well, now he's just. No, now he's like local in Alabama, but he goes hunting deer still. And he like, I told you the fistfight thing, right? No, this is the weirdest thing. I was getting a ride. This is a quick story. I was getting a ride back from college with my friend Sean. You recording all this?

Yeah.

My friend Sean was driving to mobile where his dad lived, and on the way back, I'm riding with this guy, and he's like, oh, dude, I forgot to ask. I want to ask you. This is your dad's name, julian? And I'm like, yeah, julian Trustley's like, your dad assaulted my dad in a dad. My dad beat up my friend's dad from in college.

When did this.

The assault happened, I think, before me and this guy were in college together. But if you look at the probability of getting a ride back from college with a guy who was the mobile, the probability of your dad having beaten his dad up, it's so slim. It's so slim that. What are the odds that we both go to this liberal arts college of 500 students. And the one other guy from Mobile, Alabama, his father had been assaulted by my father in a bar.

Those are pretty small ods.

Minuscule ods.

It's pretty funny, too, that it would be your dad, too, because you're like, the opposite. I could never imagine you just assaulting someone. Even if somebody got really mad at you, you'd be like, all right, well, fuck you, man. And you just like, get out of there. The idea of you assaulting someone is beyond comprehension. So the idea of your dad being this fucking hollow tooth, bullet carrying, savage, beating the fuck out of your friend's dad getting arrested. Jesus Christ.

He got arrested in the parking lot. Two cops took him down, and he got arrested.

My dad came home from high school once with a black eye. Him and his coworker, they were doing a business together, and the business started going bad, and they got in a fucking fistfight, and he came home, and I remember looking at him, I was like, 16 or 17 or something like that. In a black eye was like, what the fuck, man? Are you done with this? You're still duking it out at 40. Whatever the hell old he was back then. Well.

It'S a classic man.

It's weird.

A classic man fought. Think of Hemingway. That's what's just part of being a man is like you would get in it some inevitable fistfight. And in those days, it seems like you don't get in a fistfight, and there's lawsuits and legal stuff. It's just like the other guy accepts getting his ass kicked. You're the victor, and that's it. Or you get your ass kicked and you forget about it. That seems like the old way it is. Now, if you get in a fistfight, you end up in serious legal trouble. You get an instant lawsuit. But it used to just be like when you see elk smashing into each other in the wilderness. That's what it used to be. Being a man. You would just run into a guy and just start punching each other, and then that was it.

Those were the days, back in the good old days before writing shit down. Once people had a few mistakes and started writing shit down, they were like.

Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, blame it on Hammurabi. It's all Hammerabi's fault.

And that gentleman, his name is Sharid. Sharad. Sharad. Sharad and Lucas. And they're from Grindhouse Wetware. And Grindhouse Wetware. First of all, greatest name for a company. Amazing ever. What does that mean?

So it comes from the name grinders.

Get real close to that.

That's what we are. We're grinders. Grinders are kind of like what happens when you mix open source hackers and body modification with a dash of transhumanism and wetwares. Is this your body? So we're literally grinding our biology.

There's all these interesting little names that you guys have for yourselves. First of all, grinders, we're grinders. We're transhumanists, where there's a lot of self defining going on there.

Well, it's not exactly that we're self defining. We're just guys who we really like technology and we all grew up with. Like, you talk about growing up with Hemingway and classic men, and we were all about fighting. We were protected and sheltered and grew up with Star wars and grew up with these stories about robots that could think and people that couldn't live any longer and had to augment themselves and cyborgs and, well, cyborgs were really cool. We thought they were really cool. And I was in my 20s when we hit the year 2001st thing that happened, New Year's Eve, 2000. And after I got over the shock of nothing hitting the wall, nothing falling out of the sky, I turned to my brother and went, where is my fucking jetpack? And that kind of summed it up. I felt that way, my buddies felt that way. I didn't realize it, but there were a lot of people who felt that way. And we were all broke, and we didn't know much about science. And somewhere along the line, like, I guess in 2006, there was a kid in Arizona who realized that he could start stimulating his nerves with magnets, with magnetic implants. He went to a body mod guy and got an implant done in his fingers. It started going from him to a guy in Europe. And then, like, 2008, there was Lady Quinn Norton