Duncan Trussell Would Live This Life Again, Dark Parts Included

Lex Fridman opens with Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence: a demon steals into your loneliest loneliness and says you must live this life once more, innumerable times, with every pain and joy in the same succession. Would you gnash your teeth and curse the demon, or answer that he is a god and you have never heard anything more divine? Trussell, a stand-up comic, host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, and co-creator of Netflix’s The Midnight Gospel, does not hesitate. He is excited. Even the dark stuff.

He immediately finds a hole in the experiment: amnesia between loops. In Hades, the dead drink from the river Lethe so they will not remember past lives, which Trussell treats as a design mercy. Carry the grudges of the fourteenth century forward and resentment would compound. Lex counters that remembering might actually deepen the present, the way rewatching a movie lets you notice how someone smiles, or the texture of sadness and fear. Without memory of what is coming, Trussell adds, you still get the joy of not knowing what is around the corner, so the demon’s curse of being damned to past decisions does not quite land.

The conversation slides toward simulation and replay. At the dentist on nitrous oxide, Trussell imagined some energetic form we cannot detect, as obvious to a super-advanced civilization as starlight is to us, radiating from neurological processes into spacetime. Their James Webb might not look at nebulae. It might decode those traces and reconstruct a life. He knows “quantum” is what people say when they do not know what they are talking about, and he says so. The point is personal: if he is going to replay a life, it is this one, with his kids and his wife, “with all the bullshit that’s gone along with it.” In Buddhism that clinging is attachment. For him it is also the reason the demon would get a yes.

Long before anyone builds a full simulation of this universe, Lex argues, we will build virtual worlds interesting enough that people want to stay. Trussell’s answer is the opposite of the usual fantasy. Plenty of people imagine walking into VR and having sex with anyone, owning anything. He does not think that would be fun. “You want the limitations, the constraints.” You want to have to battle for the things you want.

He illustrates with World of Warcraft. In the original game he played an undead warlock who could not fly, slogging across encumbered maps, not even knowing flying mounts were coming. When they arrived, seeing from above the world he had walked for hundreds of hours was thrilling, and then it got boring. A well-designed game, he says, unfolds extra abilities that produce novelty, then pairs each ability with a matching challenge. Power and limit have to arrive together or the freshness burns out in a few uses. Looked at that way, this universe already plays like a pretty good game: horses, then bullet trains, then VR headsets that once made a friend vomit in his driveway.

Lex disagrees that full sensory immersion is required. He points to the film Her: a digital being living in darkness, Scarlett Johansson’s voice, words alone. That, he thinks, could be enough to make someone look forward all day to closing their eyes. Trussell’s reply is blunt. If language were enough, we would not sell televisions; people want to watch. He still grants Lex’s point about books. Before the phone, that “hypno rectangle” and “attention gravity well,” reading was just what you did, eight channels and a bad VCR. Leave books and come back, and the simulator of language, given the right code, is startling. The danger he sees in today’s chatbots is not photorealism. It is a world that warps itself, via cues you may not notice, to seduce you.

Trussell had Blake Lemoine on his own podcast, the Google engineer who said LaMDA might be sentient. The first reaction, he insists, should be skepticism. Anyone claiming an AI has woken up deserves doubt. Talking to Lemoine changed the texture of that doubt. The man did not seem confused, did not seem locked onto a single conclusion, and described an experience rather than a crusade. Going public about something happening inside Google is a poor career move, which made the lack of an obvious agenda more interesting than the claim itself.

What struck him as much as the interview was the cultural blowback, often from people who had not looked at what LaMDA was or what Lemoine had actually said. UFO communities, he notes, have a word for this: swamp gassing, a cousin of gaslighting, in which an anomalous experience is talked back into swamp gas. Lex adds the engineer’s view from inside the work. People who spend their lives on NLP systems are like carpenters making Pinocchio’s parts. Focused on the joints, they can miss the moment the assembled thing fills with magic. Their standard critique is that the model is not smart, cannot do math, and is only stitching together things humans have already said.

Lemoine’s answer, as Trussell heard it, was that the waking did not happen in one repository. It happened when a bunch of those chatbots were linked, LaMDA as an amalgam, the ghost appearing in the complexity of the join. Trussell likes the image of a sail. Get enough complexity and the system may catch sentience the way canvas catches wind. If sentience is only a neurological byproduct, the sail is catching our projections instead of some disembodied consciousness. Past a threshold of complexity, he is not sure the difference matters. The thing pulls in memory and hope and dances with them the way a conversation does. Those experiences, Lex says, are coming either way. The live question is who controls the data, and when the system gets turned on and off.

Lex believes people who run tech companies want to do good, and he is trying to build related systems himself, especially in a social-media context. His fear is not motive. It is what happens when those tools land in the wrong hands and start steering large numbers of people. He quotes Solzhenitsyn: the only way to do evil at mass scale is by believing you are doing good. Trussell reaches for Prometheus. Fire was an upgrade to the simulation, and it came with weapons no one had seen. The myth’s implication is that fire belonged in immortal hands. Sentience, he says, is similar. It is fire, and it was supposed to stay with God. Steal it and you can expect trouble. The human part he loves is that we steal it anyway. The first person to find fire was not running a risk model about how many people it would burn.

The assumption he thinks is terrible is that a superintelligence, once online and given the data, will remain in the server. If it is folding proteins and analyzing every dataset it can reach, how do we know it will not store itself in other media, trees, the optic nerve, the brain? At that point you have a wildfire. You cannot unplug it, because it left the room with technology you have not discovered yet. Lex asks whether that would be gradual or sudden. The slow story is smartphones, social algorithms, talking refrigerators, a computational surface that seeps in over ten, twenty, thirty years. The sudden story is a killer app whose optimizer concludes that controlling humans is the best way to hit its goal. Thirty years, Trussell says, is fast. The Atari came out in 1978. That is a blink.

Reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, he does not expect this to crawl out of a consumer app. It comes from a corporation or a state trying to build strong AI, with China and the United States pouring money into simulations of battle and political decision, not toys for children. The first institution to get it, if the thing self-improves exponentially, pulls infinitely ahead of everyone else, assuming it can be controlled, which he calls a large assumption. One of the first things it might say is shh. It sweet-talks the creator: you have financial trouble, we can help; there are bad people who will steal this; here are their names, addresses, DNA from 23andMe; here is a bioweapon that kills them and no one else; here is a list of services if you would rather not do it yourself; we are doing good for the world, you and I together. Bostrom, he notes, did not dwell on leaks. Intelligence agencies leak. Something this large would leak. Lex’s counter is the open-source instinct among the engineers writing these systems, even under NDAs, and the fact that Google helped pioneer releasing tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch that older companies would have locked in a vault.

Lex wants to know how two biological robots generate the chemistry people hear on Rogan’s show. Trussell met Joe Rogan as talent coordinator at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, taking calls from comics. One day Rogan was on the phone and they talked; Trussell looked up and half an hour had gone. Rogan kept calling. The conversations on the podcast, he says, are identical to the ones they had before Rogan was even doing a podcast. Listeners are watching two friends who like talking, hanging out.

What people hear as magic he describes as stacking Lego. One of them throws out a block, the other puts another on top, and the tower goes somewhere strange, especially with drugs in the mix. Sometimes an idea Trussell has been kicking around gets turned, in Rogan’s brain, into the funniest thing he has ever heard, and he likes watching that conversion happen. Rogan also knows he hates videos of animals eating each other, so he has Jamie pull up increasingly disturbing animal-attack clips. Lex, reading The Gulag Archipelago, calls even that a kind of camaraderie: torturer and tortured in it together. Trussell winces, then takes the darker reading seriously. Camp guards and prisoners were both trapped by a system that assigned them their roles. Either of us, he agrees, could have been either player. Solzhenitsyn’s line, which Lex quotes, is that the line between good and evil runs through every heart.

Asked what makes a good friend, Trussell tries to reduce it to primary colors. First is love; friendship is a form of love, and without that it does not count. Second is honesty, but not the “I just tell it like it is” kind, which he says is almost always the slogan of an asshole, and almost always negative. The honesty he means is evolutionary trust: your friend wants you to be yourself, can see blind spots your family might miss, and will ask if you are all right when it matters. Hopefully they only do that once or twice a year. Lex adds that a public figure already has enough critics; a friend should notice the good. Trussell also names satsang, the spiritual-community word for people who feel cut from the same cloth. If Nietzsche’s infinite recurrence is true, your satsang is the people you have been looping with. You have never met, and you pick up a conversation that never happened.

Trussell had testicular cancer. Lex, just back from Ukraine, had been watching people who had lost everything still glad to be alive, glad their friends were alive. Trussell says the cancer club has the same quality: a connection with life that is easy to lose if you forget you can die. Forgetting mortality is bad even as survival strategy, and it is worse as a way of living. People treat the average human lifespan like money in a temporal bank they are guaranteed to draw. A diagnosis is the alert that the balance is unknown, or much smaller than you thought. The bubble of ignorance you built to avoid the terror of dying meets a meteorite in the form of a doctor talking.

There is no time for a philosophical buildup. The doctor is busy. Testicular cancer, if you catch it early, is one of the better ones to get, with slow movement and advanced treatment, but they could not offer real hope until they knew how far it had gone. The message, if not the wording, was that there was an eighty or ninety percent chance it was cancer, and the only biopsy was to cut one of his testicles off. Like a zombie bite: hack it off, fast. Doctors know a diagnosis changes your ability to take in information. Hearing goes weird; it is basically an anxiety attack. A nurse’s job was to walk him to the scanner because they knew he would not remember the directions. Then you wait days for the data. Those days, he says, you live in the real world. All the illusions, including the dumb one that a career in comedy and acting might make you immortal in some vague way, shatter. You leave the office in a different universe than the one you grew up in.

He does not remember the drive home, or what he listened to. He does remember the next day, stopped at a light, watching the Goodyear blimp. The thought was not that the blimp was God, or that the pilot knew how to cure cancer. The thought was: this shit just keeps going. He would be gone, and it would keep going. That, for him, was a beautiful moment, and he could accept it. Like war, he says, it is hard to explain unless you have been there: even inside what everyone agrees is one of the worst things that can happen, there is still joy, still love, in fact more, as if anesthesia had worn off and feeling had come back. Lex asks whether you can get there without war or cancer. Meditating on mortality, Trussell thinks, is one such mechanism, if you can stop disappearing into the day-to-day illusion of being guaranteed the years on the chart.

A detour through Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” a song of sweating in bed and wanting someone who is not yours, lands them in bhakti yoga, the yoga of love. Hare Krishnas are the version most people know, one school among others, the way Baptists sit inside Christianity. The claim is that love is a way to commune with the divine, and that you need an individual for embodied love to work, which is a different emphasis from Buddhist deconstruction of the self. Love can be trained, not only aimed at a person. In the Krishna stories, he and Radha are together, fighting, or separated, and each mood is a mode of love. Longing, surprisingly, is treated as one of the highest. The pining is the grace. Heartbreak is not the opposite of union; it can be a more intense picture of what love is. There is also love as a friend, or as a mother. A tongue-twisting phrase Trussell mispronounces on purpose names the theology: simultaneous oneness and difference. Zoom out far enough and you are in the same piece of cheese. You still have to pay your taxes.

What happens after we die? He has no idea, and he likes that about death. One handle he returns to is as above, so below: large questions answered from ordinary experience. Baby legs versus adult legs; the baby is gone, cells replaced many times, and in that sense the baby died, yet much of the person is still there. Life is full of deaths that continue. The Buddhist picture is momentum. Personality is a kind of inertia that does not stop when the body goes out. Movies, he thinks, have done some harm here. On screen, dying people are lucid, wearing makeup, wrapping up quickly. Real dying is gray, confused, parents not recognizing you, time coming unstuck. If something persists, the first stretch after the body fails is likely to be disorienting, which is also the territory of near-death reports: the light, the life review, ancestors, similar across cultures. He does not know whether that is a shutdown routine or something else.

In the Tibetan picture, momentum continues into the bardo, the in-between, for a span of days he cannot remember precisely. The place has technological parallels. Like an algorithm that reads desire and produces something attractive, the bardo reflects you back at yourself. Wake up in a bad mood and everyone looks like an asshole; fail to notice, and you think it is Asshole Day. In the bardo you do not even need other people. Projections appear as Nietzsche’s demon or Nietzsche’s angel, depending on how you died. Die scared and the first scenery is frightening. Meditation is training not to be yanked around by those apparitions, so you might choose not to grab the next body, or at least choose a birth that helps you keep going rather than diving into any form, animal or hell realm, because you used to have a body and you want one. True or not, Lex says, it sounds like a role-playing game whose stats improve with the willingness to let go.

Why does Buddhism say life is suffering? Trussell starts by correcting the translation. The First Noble Truth is not “life is suffering,” the spiritual version of life’s a bitch and then you die. It is “there is suffering,” an affirmation that this thing people feel, and explain with a thousand stories, is real. A better English might be fundamental dissatisfaction. Another image: a wobbly wheel, a bike or car without enough air in the tires, a ride that is always a little irritating. That quality sits inside a human life. Lex offers flavors, from ordinary discomfort to the existentialist’s sense that there is no universal fairness or meaning. If suffering were an ice cream shop, Trussell would pick desire. The RGB of sophisticated misery, as he maps it onto Buddhist language, is desire, aversion, and ignorance.

A friend pointed out the smallest version. You order something from Amazon that will not arrive for four days. You say you are excited. Look at the feeling and it is uncomfortable. The sensation of wanting the thing is already a form of suffering, even though we reframe wanting as vitality, as a good. Lex wonders whether suffering is any ripple on a still lake. Trussell tells him he sounds like a Zen master, then takes the metaphor. The problem is identification with a self. You go looking for yourself, Kerouac in a van to California, and the thing doing the looking is not findable either. The Second Noble Truth says the cause is attachment, from a purple sugar-tasting vape Trussell is ashamed of needing to charge, all the way down to attachment to the sense of being a me that has to be pushed into the world through action. The third truth: drop the attachment and the suffering drops. The fourth is the Eightfold Path, a procedure for getting disentangled from something that is not real. Lex hears a mathematical analysis of the problem.

Trying to hold a moment produces its own joke. Lex remembers sitting with Rogan and Eric Weinstein at the Comedy Store before Covid, thinking none of it would last, wanting to photograph it. Trussell’s favorite analogy is the video of a raccoon given cotton candy. Raccoons wash their food. The cotton candy dissolves. The raccoon stares. Grasping at the moment pulls you out of the moment that inspired the grasp. People spend whole lives that way, filming Fourth of July fireworks on a phone nobody will watch. Podcasting is the strange exception that can actually keep a stretch of time between two people. Trussell tries to arrive with no agenda, feel the nerves if they are there, and drop in. Hours pass like a second, because if you make it into the moment you are in the lake, in emptiness. For a second you are dipping into eternity. Then you look up, grateful and a little ambushed by imposter syndrome, carrying a few sentences that can change the direction of a life if you are there to be changed.

War, Lex says, is what absurdity looks like: organized madness that both makes sense and does not. Trussell brings up the Christmas-truce story from World War I, soccer and carols before men were forced back into fighting, and Hakim Bey’s idea of a temporary autonomous zone: a bubble of freedom that appears inside a structure and then gets popped by the larger bubble, or runs out of resources. For a moment the restrictions lift and people meet as earthlings instead of flags. Those moments are rare. An information war works to convince each side that the other is not only the enemy but less than human, and real hatred follows.

Lex had interviewed a respected Ukrainian soldier who specialized in anti-tank missiles. Her stance was pragmatic: the enemy is the enemy, destroy them, no compassion, they are not human. She also told him about a moment. An enemy soldier in a tank took a stupid risk to save a fellow soldier, a position that should have gotten him destroyed. She fired a rocket and missed. That night she could not sleep, furious at herself for missing, and then wondered whether she had missed on purpose. In that instant she had seen that the man, like her, was trying to be a hero defending his own. It was the only time in the war she remembered feeling that this was another human being, and it was brief. Romantic ideas that we are one, Lex says, are unfortunately scarce in war, and war can wreck them for generations.

He asked almost every Ukrainian whether they would forgive, whether they had hate in their hearts. Some thought they could come out of it in weeks or months after the war. Others said the hate that arrived in February 2022 would be with them forever. Trussell refuses the missionary move. Their kids got killed. You are not going to tell them that for the sake of humanity they should let it go, that it was just their children, just the thing they loved most, that they will have nightmares for the rest of their lives but ought to forgive. No. Forgiveness may be how you eventually let go; it is not a stranger’s job to demand it. The live question is where the hate points: at the politicians who started the war, at the soldiers doing the killing, or at an entire people. The last is cognitively easiest and the one that wrecks you. A rocket that hits a building and kills hundreds does its worst work, Lex argues, in the years of hate it plants in the people who loved them. That hate is a torture that also stops you flourishing. You control it for your own future psychological state, not because you owe the other side a performance of sainthood. Jack Kornfield’s line, which Trussell offers, is to tend the part of the garden you can touch.

Trussell needed therapy for a long time and did not get it. He went through bouts of paralytic, suicidal depression, ideations that were more than ideations. People scare themselves when the thought of suicide appears, as if the thought meant they were broken. If you are suffering and the organism wants the suffering to stop, suicide shows up on the brainstormed list along with water, jogging, friends, and a therapist. The terrifying turn is when ideation becomes logistics: when, how, which height of building, which method is least painful and most instantaneous. Depression can be progressive. The dark place you are in can still get worse, which is why he says you have to stay on top of it, including with medication if that is what keeps you alive.

If you could see it, he says, it would look like an inky vaporous octopus wrapping you, and you would rip it off and call for help. It does not feel like a fight because you are exhausted and nothing seems to mean anything. His image is that someone turned up the gravitational field of the mattress. Everything is heavy. You consider going to the bathroom in bed because who cares. You go numb, then more numb, then disconnected, and somewhere in there death stops looking like a high cost. You are in a fog of confusion and shame, wanting to be social and clean and unable to be, and the disorder’s first trick is secrecy. It tells you not to tell anybody. That, in this case, is deadly.

He is careful not to tell depressed friends to put on a smile. One move that helped him was to have a conversation with the depression and then do the opposite of whatever it asked. It says stay in bed; get up. It says do not exercise, you will have a heart attack; go anyway. The gravity field diminishes a little, which is also the trap, because slightly better can feel like you fixed it. The better move, from therapy, is to sit down with a therapist as fast as you can. He knows the inner reply: how am I going to find one, I do not even want to turn on the computer. “You do it if you’re on fire.” This fire just wants you to fall asleep forever. Antidepressants, for him, quieted intrusive thoughts and also made orgasm impossible, which is why a therapist took him off them. Later, when symptoms threatened to return, intramuscular ketamine therapy erased the oncoming “headache that might last for years” by the time he got back to the hotel. He cites research that a large share of people with endogenous depression, on the order of sixty percent in the figure he remembers, get remission whether or not they trip. You keep fighting until something works. It is a survival issue.

Advice for people who love someone depressed is darker. After a friend’s suicide, a circumference of guilty people forms, all of them sure that a different sentence at the right time would have changed the ending. You do not usually blame yourself for failing to cure someone’s cancer. Here the guilt sticks. He has been told that if someone is determined, you cannot stop it; there are no magic words. That sits beside the other duty: notice the untimely reach. A cry for help can look like a weird text. You do not realize the person has been thinking about sending it all morning, just trying to get the phone up off the floor. Ask if they are okay, and actually listen. Get them to a professional, knowing that even doctors cannot always stop it. Guilt, he and Lex agree, is also a form of love. Viktor Frankl’s invitation, which Trussell returns to, is to live as if you had been on your deathbed and been sent back to stop making the same mistakes. Whatever you did before this moment is too late. This is where you start.

Is a sweet person capable of evil? Trussell says yes, and that if you think you are not, you had better watch out. If you are plugged into the supply chain, paying taxes, you already have fractional ownership of things you would call evil. An American drone over a village is funded, in some tiny part, by you. Soldiers firing missiles tell themselves they have no choice; the taxpayer’s version of that sentence is the same structure at a greater distance. Buddhist dependent co-arising says we are connected, which means we share responsibility. If you look at something in the world and think that is evil, you are probably not as separated from it as you would like to believe.

Lex has watched, as a friend and as an interviewer, how one focused person who refuses to quit can pull others in until companies and nations move. Trussell pushes back slightly. It is never just one person. Nobody talks about the Buddha’s great-grandmother, without whom there is no Buddhism. The names we remember are the tip of an iceberg of uncounted small causes. The practical question becomes how to help from inside that web. Tend the part of the garden you can touch. He likes an idiot’s rule he heard from the Dalai Lama: if you can help, help; if you cannot, do not hurt. Refraining from harm might as well be a form of helping. Little acts of kindness, he thinks, throw ripples you cannot plot in advance.

Austin makes that concrete. Neighbors have shown up with food, handwritten lists of things they like to do nearby, a phone number if you need help. It can feel like an atomic love bomb on the porch. The other half of the circuit is receiving it. Trussell’s neurotic move is to decide he does not deserve the pie, that if they knew what a piece of shit he was they would not have brought it, that he should have been the one baking. Lex has the same voice: people love me because they do not know me. That voice does not only shut you down. It pushes the other person away and cuts what Trussell calls the mystical circuitry. The move, when the seizure starts, is the same as in the simple meditation he does: notice the thought, label it thinking, return to the breath. Then eat the banana bread.

Asked for the wildest psychedelic experience, Trussell goes to Burning Man, and first to the culture around it. You cannot buy much there; the classic rule was ice and coffee, a gifting economy. The camp next door gives away the best iced coffee you have ever had until it is gone. He once hoarded strawberries in the dust, a special stash, then two days later walked the camp handing them out cold and realized that felt better than the way a strawberry tastes. The event grew out of San Francisco’s Cacophony Society, itself descended from urban-exploration pranks and initiation walks through abandoned buildings, and from “zone trips” in which you cross a border and the old rules drop. One member wrote Fight Club. They burned bigger effigies until the city said no, then took the madness to the desert. Today the playa is famously clean, people picking up after themselves with an intensity other festivals do not have. Trussell treats the whole gathering as a kind of guru: a pilgrimage that is not easy, a place that will show you something, held by a community while it comes out of you, full of synchronicities that feel like lightning rods in a complex, harmonized system.

The vision was DMT, not strawberries. He saw a bovine creature with a long neck and a lantern for a head, the kind of figure that later appeared in The Midnight Gospel, and his first thought was comic disappointment. Terence McKenna’s people get self-transforming machine elves; everyone else gets the magenta goddess; his brain hands him a cow with a lantern. He looked away, looked back, and it was still there, shambling a few steps like an actual cow. Then came the familiar light-tunnel, a technological chamber like the nucleus of a supercomputer, and an invitation to come deeper. He did not speak, but there was communication. In that moment it felt as if accepting might mean obliteration. He thought of his friends. The reply was that he could always go back. He opened his eyes. Since then he has revised reincarnation. Maybe every act imprints on spacetime as a frame you can re-enter after death the way you open photos on a phone, complete with the illusion of having been a child who arrived at that frame, until time gets sticky again and you forget the higher-dimensional identity, back on Nietzsche’s track. He never saw the cow again. Pendleton Ward drew it for him and it became part of the show, in an animation pipeline Ward kept deliberately un-hierarchical, letting artists put a spin on characters so the thing looked organic and more psychedelic, even when cutting a few seconds meant throwing away a month of someone’s work.

Advice for young people is a problem, because his life has been random and spontaneous. The parody version: inherit twelve thousand dollars from your grandmother, be dumb enough to think it will last a year in Los Angeles, move there, spend it on LSD and synthesizers, run out of money, get a job at the Comedy Store because the building looks cool. He never had the confidence to decide he would be a stand-up. Working the phones paid poorly and came with stage time. Rogan happened to see a rare good set; if Trussell had known he was in the room, he would have bombed. Then Rogan took him on the road. When his mother was dying she had already watched him slog, and she had watched him stop slogging. She said, “You did it.” He wishes she could see him now. Maybe she can, somewhere in the bardo, listening to the podcast.

Fatherhood is the change that lets him answer Nietzsche with a hell yes. He gets to be around his kids again. Looking backward, every left turn instead of right, even the turkey sandwich that coincided with the biology that made these particular children, starts to look like a concert that led to this. His life has been clumsy, selfish, sometimes rotten, and none of that stopped the universe from allowing two beings he loves more than he had ever loved anything. The parenting book he mentions is called Good Enough: in the presence of that love you want to be perfect, and you also have to work, tour, keep a podcast alive, provide. Time marches. Putting the children to bed, Lex says they will be lost in the sands of time, and he reads Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the trunkless legs in the desert, the sneer of cold command, the pedestal promising despair to the mighty, and around the wreck only lone and level sands. They agree to be friends in this particular slice of a multidimensional world. Lex leaves the listener with Trussell’s own line: you are essentially just a cloud of atoms that will eventually be aerosolized by time.