Duncan Trussell recorded this conversation with his mother while she was facing terminal cancer.
What you’re hearing isn’t scripted. It isn’t performed. It’s a son sitting with his dying mother trying to hold onto every word before the words run out.
And she, the one facing the end, is the one doing the comforting.
That is what makes these conversations so extraordinary. Not the wisdom itself, as profound as it is. But who it’s coming from. A woman who had every reason to be consumed by her own fear choosing instead to spend what little time remained helping her son understand how to live without her.
These recordings became the heart of The Midnight Gospel. And I always go back to watch it again.
They remain some of the most honest conversations about death, love and what it means to be human ever put on screen…
India gliding beneath the International Space Station, seen from just 70 km above Earth 🇮🇳🌍
A breathtaking perspective of our incredible planet from space.
#India#ISS#EarthFromSpace#Space
🚨 𝗡𝗘𝗪: Myles Lewis-Skelly reveals he uses BUDDHISM and breathing techniques to deal with pressure and nerves before matches.
🗣️ “There’s a Buddhist concept called the ‘monkey mind’, which is about the restless mind jumping from concern to concern.”
“When I feel pressure, I try to calm my nervous system and bring stillness back to my mind through breathing techniques, music or talking to people.”
“The mind is a muscle, so you have to TRAIN it.”
The 2020s are arguably one of the worst decades for Europe in modern history.
It began with the pandemic lockdowns which contracted GDP by -6.1% across the EU, the biggest drawdown since the 1930s.
This was followed by the Ukraine War which began the ongoing energy crisis.
Then, the AI Revolution began in 2022, in which Europe has fallen significantly behind the US and China.
Between 2020 and 2025, the US deployed roughly ~$500 billion of venture capital into AI compared to just ~$50 billion in Europe.
Europe was then hit by the highest tariffs in US history, impacting $600+ billion of annual European exports to the US.
Now, the Iran War has pushed Europe into its worst energy crisis ever, with central banks being forced to raise interest rates.
The 2020s will be remembered as one of Europe's most disruptive decades in history.
The agitation from errors (that come from genuine attempts to do something new) is what gates rewiring of your brain and learning, especially in adulthood. Full conversation with @joerogan@spotifypodcasts@Spotify now.
this quote from Carl Jung is truly great:
"The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. 1/2
MIT, autumn 2011. Four years before his death, an eighty-four-year-old man explained, on camera, why the self you feel yourself to be is an illusion built out of stupid parts. Then he showed you which ones.
Marvin Minsky co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959, with John McCarthy. He won the Turing Award in 1969. He built a robotic arm in the late sixties that used a camera and a computer to stack blocks, and it was that work, trying to make a machine pick things up, that pushed him toward the question of what a mind actually is.
He was also the technical adviser on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he is named inside the film itself.
The course is 6.868, The Society of Mind. There is no single thinker inside your head, he tells the room. What you experience as one continuous self is the output of a large number of small processes, none of which is intelligent, none of which understands what it is doing, and most of which are arguing.
Intelligence, on his account, is not a thing. It is what a crowd of stupid mechanisms looks like from the outside once they are organised well enough to argue their way to an answer.
Then he spends thirteen lectures naming the crowd.
Consciousness. Emotion. Pain. Why an infant cries. Why you can be in two minds about something, literally, because on his account you are made of minds, plural, and disagreement between them is not a malfunction.
One lecture is called From Panic to Suffering. Another asks what consciousness is, and argues the question itself is badly formed, which is a stranger claim than saying it is hard.
He teaches it the way an old man tells stories. No slides marching forward, no script. He wanders, digresses, follows a thought sideways for ten minutes, and lands somewhere you did not expect.
This is the last recording of the course. Minsky died in January 2016, at eighty-eight.
It is free. Thirteen lectures, the readings, the assignments, and the book the course is built on, which he put on his own website. No login, no cohort, no waitlist.
What it costs you is the sense that there is someone in there running the show. By the end, he has replaced that someone with a committee, and told you what sits on it.
Never criticize people overtly— that will make them insecure, and resistant to change. Plant ideas, insinuate suggestions. Charmed by your diplomatic skills, people will not notice your growing power.