Hunter Biden, Matt McCusker & Duncan Trussell - Mostly Wise #2 - #1136

I changed my wife’s contact name to Peter Thiel because people insist I’m in his orbit. So when she rings, Peter Thiel is calling. I’ve never met him, which makes it funnier—please stop making it worse.

I love Peter Thiel, obviously out of self-preservation. But watching him go from Palantir to the Antichrist was genuinely scary. Tech is becoming its own apocalyptic religion: bunkers, AI catastrophe, the final event.

I’m not scared of a laptop becoming my manager. I’m scared of meeting a DARPA robot dog in the woods. Apparently Coke kills it, so don’t panic.

We accept surveillance once it has a friendly practical story. A camera network is dystopian; a robot dog protecting an officer sounds reasonable. That is a very low threshold for not being freaked out.

We hand our lives to the heroin brick in our pocket. Apps learn how we move, think, vote, buy, desire—everything. Companies need not be cartoon villains; their purpose is extracting more money from us.

Phones are extracting an astonishing amount of jizz from humanity every day. That has to be part of the data picture.

What does it do to you to become maybe the most searched drug addict alive? Early sobriety, a young family, and suddenly the world has access to the ugliest material imaginable.

At first it flattened me. I had to choose between staying in bed and dying, or getting up and living. Shame and secrets kept my addiction alive; once there were no secrets left, I had a chance to survive.

In Palm Springs, a lawyer friend called about a repair-shop story. I never imagined it becoming this huge symbol, with years of cloud material turned into a ready-made corruption narrative. My addiction happened, and I’m responsible. But it became proof I was only a useless son living off my father, erasing Yale Law, businesses, and my family.

The threat of intimate images everywhere must have been uniquely deranging: strangers publishing the worst moment of your life without permission.

It was paralyzing. Some images were real, some weren’t mine as people assumed, and some were staged around me while I slept. Drugs are never an excuse. But accountability is different from making addiction a permanent scarlet letter.

Tens of millions of Americans face addiction, and nearly everybody loves somebody in that fight. Deep in it, the world gets smaller and predatory. The morning the story exploded, I looked at Melissa, who helped save my life, and our baby. It was live or die. Relapse under that shame would have killed me, so I chose life. Alcohol was hardest to leave.

Your dad’s love was striking. Active addiction is a honey badger loose in a family: it tears through everyone. Staying tender when damage keeps landing is incredibly hard.

What people miss is how sincerely my dad cares about individuals. He’s called people who stutter for months or years, telling them they’re smart and less defined by what hurts them. He got older in public; that was fair to discuss. I saw his experience produce results, then saw him make the extraordinarily hard choice to step aside.

The White House gave me awe every time—remarkable staff, hidden doors that aren’t very hidden, that walk toward the Oval Office. But scrutiny made family visits hard. I wanted presidential pancakes.

I want every question. If I can stay sober through public humiliation, maybe somebody else can survive their hell. I hurt people, especially my children, but openness isn’t weakness. Secrets were the disease. I’m not running for office; if I announce soon, assume I relapsed. I’m writing and making space for people to hear they’re not alone.

For my kids: stay clean, sober, and present. My dad is sick, and I adore him. He has always been our family’s center through affection and presence, not office. Politically, I want authenticity. Democratic socialist, centrist, Republican—I can work with anybody who means it about the constitutional republic.

Trump’s willingness to say anything is not truthfulness. Leadership tells people what’s hard and how to face it. I hate what he’s done, though Democrats aren’t blameless for every failure. He is uniquely destructive: cruelty as entertainment and power as personal property. Young people feel rigged out of homes and stable lives, but politics cares about you whether you care about it.

I’m not policing bad thoughts online; I mean consumer safety. If a platform knows its design harms children, or AI steers a vulnerable person toward self-destruction, that is not free speech. We hold other dangerous products accountable.

Regulating algorithms may be sensible, but it can become censorship fast. Companies study how to hack our nervous systems. Still, I don’t want somebody declaring dissent unsafe and shutting it down.

That concern matters. But corporations cannot dominate the debate with fortunes spent protecting immunity. There’s a line between speech and a product knowingly engineered to injure users.

AI may be incredible, but superintelligence is another thing: like an alien arriving with capacities we cannot measure. It could be utopian; the transition could be terrifying. Technology can build terrible tools and countermeasures, but that doesn’t make it less frightening.

Maybe this is the greatest marketing campaign ever: forty Stanford people asking how to make it feel inevitable. But gene editing and local models make the immediate nightmare clear—angry people getting powers once reserved for major labs.

I came out freer. The game is getting out of my head and being useful—to my wife, kids, dad, waiter, driver, whoever is in front of me. Service is selfish in the best way: it keeps me alive.

For seven years sober, we got you a Native American flute. From one former pipe guy to another—this one is for music. Keep your ring finger in place and apparently you can’t screw it up.

This is beautiful. Everybody knows I used to smoke crack from a pipe, so this joke is horrible and perfect. Will TSA let me bring it home? I appreciate you boys. You rule.