The Brainrot Apocalypse (a DIY survival guide) b

This is a video about you, or about your brain. Well, really it's about the war for your brain. Which isn't a war you can see. And I don't blame you if you don't believe that it's happening. Because that's the way it was designed. It's a slow and gradual war. One that disempowers you without you even noticing. The weapons? Comfort, convenience and confusion. The target is your mind. Specifically, it's about the dangers of outsourcing thinking to AI. And what this looks like on a backdrop of phone addiction, endless propaganda and shady tech companies with way too much power. The intention behind this war is up for debate. Maybe it's evil, social engineering, a coordinated attack on your mind. Or maybe it's an accident. People desperately vying for power any way that they can. And the collateral damage of it is you. Either way, what's not up for debate is the presence of this war. There are forces that are measurably atrophying our brains. And today we're going to talk about those as well as solutions. What you can do to win back your brain. To win the war. Because if you win, we all win. And if you lose, I don't know. Let's start. Did you know that the average daily screen time in 2025 is six plus hours? That's crazy. And that is 17 years of your adult life. Of course, like all technologies, we have to ask, is this necessarily a bad thing? Fire warms up the house. Fire burns the house down. A knife can stab you. A knife can be used by a doctor to save you. Tech can be lots of things. To answer this question, if you use the tech, no, it's not a bad thing. But if the tech uses you, then it's a very bad thing. And that is why I'm making this video. Because I have found the tech has been using me and other people way more than I am comfortable with. 17 years. Greedy. Diamond. That's too much. And I want to do something about it. Bit of research. Here's a really interesting study that came out earlier this year. It's called Your Brain on ChatGPT. Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for an essay writing task. They had three groups of students and they tasked them all to write essays. First group could use an LLM like ChatGPT. Second group could use a search engine. And the third group had to use their freaking mind brain, man. They could only use the dome. After the essays were done, they asked them a bunch of questions about the essays. One of which was, hey, can you quote something from what you've just written? And the people who use ChatGPT struggled. Over 80% of them just couldn't quote anything from whatever they had just handed in. Whereas these two did pretty all right. Then they said, do you feel like you own the work that you've just done? And the group that felt the most ownership over what they had done was the brain group. What they found is that brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support. The more you relied on tech, the less you used your freaking brain. To put it bluntly, which I probably shouldn't, the brain only group had the most brain activity or the most connections going on, followed by the search engine, followed by the LLM. They found different brain processes going on for each one, all based on how much they relied on external support. I think the most obvious parallel between the introduction of this type of technology and earlier ones has been the de-skilling of skilled craftsmen about 100 years ago, where the knowledge that existed in the worker him or herself was gradually taken away from them and embodied in machines. And that brought enormous suffering. And far from learning from those problems, we seem determined to repeat them now in the field of intellectual work. Now, you might be a skeptic. You might be thinking, okay, yeah, they use their brain a little bit less when they're writing an essay. Big deal, they're students, whatever. But this also applies to doctors. Some endoscopists were using AI detection assistants for their job to find these particular tumours. And after just three months of using this software, what they found was their natural detection rate, the skill that they had trained for, decreased significantly from 28 to 22%. They effectively de-skilled. Now, this sounds problematic, but it's also what happens with technology. A glimpse at our past always reminds us that tools are simply extensions of our natural abilities. That's external support. Perhaps we shouldn't even be trying to get the computer to imitate human behaviour. There's so many other things that the computer is so much better at. Even in the history of tech, you can say this. When GPS systems were introduced into cars, this 2005 study found that relying on that external support meant that cognitive mapping just started to go well and truly downhill. That is, your resources from here were put over here. They were outsourced. Fast forward to 2011, and the next thing that was outsourced was memory. Google effects on memory. Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. If I don't need to keep it in here, I can put it over there. Now, the idea of this isn't evil. I mean, it's kind of like journaling. You're getting stuff out of your head so you can use your head to think. But it's not quite the same. Imagine this is us, and we're using a collective external memory. Now, this all goes into some sort of computer. This is where we store all our knowledge as a society. But when it's time to retrieve it, it doesn't come straight back to us. It has to go through a private company. Uh-oh, that information looks different. This is an unknown factor. This is extremely troubling. Suddenly, whoever holds this collective memory has a whole lot of power. Now, I worry about this because any company that has their own Wikipedia page dedicated to their censorship practices generally are censoring way more than what we read here. And that, when combined with AI, really freaks me out, man. Because it's external support when we're already relying on so much external support. To put this in blunter words, what's going on here is we are outsourcing thinking to a morally cooked $500 billion tech company, like OpenAI, when we're already relying on outsourced memory to a morally cooked $3.2 trillion tech company. This genuinely terrifies me. There is so much room for manipulation and control here. Letting our brains be co-opted by whatever this machine is for 17 years of our adult life. This isn't just screen time. This is your entire cognitive faculties. This is your entire adult life. At the mercy of companies whose market cap is bigger than the GDP of most nations, whose goals are almost certainly not aligned with humanity's. If we once allow the complexity of technology to be used as an excuse for not retaining democratic control, then a huge and growing chunk of our future is abstracted from democratic control. And then you move towards a technocratic domination of society, which is one of the real dangers of science, which began as the liberator of man, could end up enslaving man by putting its power at the disposal of those who already own our factories or own our newspapers, our television stations, and in this way impose a tyranny in the guise of liberation. I hate this. There are so many risks that come with collective shallow thought when we just scrap all the deep stuff, when we skim. In fact, even this particular study, do you want to know how it was reported? The researchers wanted to make sure that people didn't sensationalize their work, so they put a very clear FAQ on their website. Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us dumber? No. Please do not use words like stupid, dumb, brain rot, harm, damage, and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, because we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you're a journalist reporting on it. ChatGPT is making us stupid. MIT. ChatGPT is making us dumber. MIT. MIT's ChatGPT says AI is making you dumber. Making people dumber. ChatGPT is making you dumber. AI makes you dumb, lazy, and dumb. Honestly, it just goes on and on and on like this. It's kind of funny. There is another part of the FAQ after saying please don't use stupid, dumb, brain rot, and damage, which is additional vocabulary to avoid when talking about the paper. Please avoid using terms like brain scans or hyperbole like terrifying findings, which means this headline is a three for three. Patrick, we got dumb, brain scans, sensationalism. And at the risk of transitioning to sensationalism of my own, I would like to talk about the one AI doomer theory that I, a staunch anti-doomer, can realistically see happening. Gradual disempowerment. Uh-oh. What's that? So this is a paper that came out earlier this year, and it's basically like that T.S. Eliot poem, you know, the world didn't end with a bang but a whimper. Or like the metaphor of the frog in the boiling pot who doesn't notice that it's getting cooked. Meanwhile, all our brains and our society's atrophy. In their words, in contrast to the abrupt takeover scenarios commonly discussed in AI safety, we analyze how even incremental improvements in AI capabilities can undermine human influence over large-scale systems that society depends on, including the economy, culture, and nation states. Gradual freaking disempowerment. This is what scares me. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Now, one way to read all this research is to say, uh-oh, we're all cooked. But another way to read it is to realize that we all already have the solution. We already have the supercomputer, man. Or to channel my inner Gil Scott Heron, the revolution will not be an AI-integrated software-as-a-service platform with a predatory subscription pricing model, unusable without a verified account, a stronger password, 3FA, capture cookies and unskippable ads that fries your brain and sells whatever's left of it to Palantir to fund wars. No, that is not where the change will come from. Won't be more. It'll be less, man. Because yes, we are cooked. But we are cooked can be read in two different ways. The first way, we're cooked, is a story that massively helps those who fry our brains because it keeps us in the figurative frying pan. If you think you're cooked, you ain't gonna do stuff, man. You're just gonna stay there and get cooked. But you could also say, we're worth cooking. I mean, if somebody wants to cook us, it's kind of a compliment, right? We gotta have something going on. We're worth cooking is a story that explains why such people fry our brains in the first place. It is because a well-trained, unfried brain is, and always has been, the single greatest threat to the status quo. The public mind is the only serious danger facing the company. And it's got to be controlled. In plain terms, what that means is that the public has to be reduced to their proper state of apathy and obedience. And you want to make sure that they don't become so curious and arrogant that they won't find humility enough to submit to a civil rule. That's right, baby. You are the solution. It's the classic parable of the baby elephant at the circus. The circus guy, he ties the rope around the baby elephant's leg. He puts it in a stake. Bang, bang, bang. And the elephant, because it's just a baby, it can't go anywhere. So it's like, tries this, tries that, tries this, tries that. And then it's like, all right, cool, I'm stuck. Got it. Now, as you know, elephants get massive. So you think you'd need a bigger stake and a stronger rope, right? Wrong. No, the circus guy doesn't change a thing. By the time the elephant gets strong enough to break the rope and rip the stake out from the ground, it's already learned that it can't. So it doesn't even try. 17 years of your adult life. You're going to spend it getting cooked or getting brain swole, man. Are you going to be the freaking used or the user? And assuming you're like, hell yeah, dog. I want a big juicy brain. How do I do it? Well, my friend, change does not happen overnight. Which is why I have come up with the cognitive workout. The ABC, anticipatory brainwash countermeasures. The second part of this video, I want to take you through five different exercises that you can do. One, scroll with a goal. Two, build your bullshit proof vest. Three, mission McClude in. That'll make sense soon. Four, practice algorithmic resistance. And five, man plans and rod laughs. For each of these topics, I'll explain what they mean. And then two exercises, a small one and a big one. A warm-up and a workout. And then finally, for the last one, we'll have a stretch and recover. Something you can do while relaxing that still makes your brain good. Before we cover these solutions, a quick disclaimer about the focus of these solutions. They are constrained. They all take place in the same place the problem does. The tech, the screen, the phone, the computer, the internet. There are so many more and a lot of better solutions that don't involve tech. Things that involve people or exercise or going to the beach. But my aim with these solutions was for all of them to be examples of you using the tech instead of the tech using you. Let's start with the first one, scroll with a goal. The rhymes, you remember it. The warm-up, articulate your plan before you unlock your phone. And then for the workout, what we'll be talking about is scrolling something that is an algorithmic slot. So let's look at this warm-up. It's a question as simple as, why am I unlocking my phone right now? Can you articulate it? Is there an actual reason? AA famously has the halt system. Am I hungry, angry, lonely or tired? If you can answer yes to any of those, then it might be a crutch. And that might not be the best thing. Or maybe it is just a force of habit. Maybe it's the compulsion. Or maybe you prefer a sharper question. Do I want to get brainwashed by a trillion dollar addictive panic machine right now? Do I? Because it's not just for the time that you have it. You know, those thoughts stay with you. As Percy and Mary Shelley warned us, one wandering thought pollutes the day. One more fact, you are vulnerable. So that's the warm-up. Just getting used to being like, why am I doing this? For the workout, it would be scroll OA.mg Campbell, what's that you're asking? OA.mg is a search engine for academic research. Oh man, I love this. Just type in anything that you want, and papers come up and you can just read them. It's so refreshing to saturate yourself in a world of people who are trying to add to knowledge bases. Sincerely add. And you can learn cool things, like apparently optimism and high emotional intelligence are linked. Isn't that nice? Or that having a sense of hope and possibility is a really good predictor for climate change action. And in my experience, all actions. And that generative AI might enhance individual creativity, but it's not the same story for collective creativity. As a whole, this tech reduces the diversity of new ideas and everything starts to look the same. The slop hypothesis. The high slop-thesis. But that's a tiny minority of the people on the net. And despite these problems, the internet is well worth the trouble it can occasionally cause you. So this is the workout for scrolling with a girl. But you'll remember I used the term or equivalent. Maybe you prefer to do an online course. My M-O-O-C, MOOC? MOOC? Massive Open Online Courses. It's just free courses that you can do to upskill anywhere. Another good place to scroll with a girl, our world in data. Fabulous website. Cannot sing its praise higher. Now it's worth pointing out, this can feel jarring. If you are going from a high dopamine content platform to something where you've got a bunch of big words with no pictures, switching can feel weird. And sometimes that has a negative effect, like it keeps you back here. If you are finding that you need a gateway drug out of the dopamine content, the best way to wean off the social media spigot, that's a weird sentence, I've found to be non-algorithmic creativity. Sites like TV Tropes. Awesome. It'll just get you reading. Things like NeoCities, the indie web. It's amazing. Or things like Aesthetics Wiki. Places where you can scroll and learn about new stuff that doesn't feel super invasive, but things that get you in the habit of scrolling with a goal. I will say though, if you are using these, it's usually pretty good to put on a timer, especially with TV Tropes, man. Damn, I could waste 17 years on that. All right, that was our first one. Scroll with a goal. Let's have a look at... Making a bullshit proof vest. What is a bullshit proof vest? It's basically training your bullshit detector. As I've put here, never skip Cognitive Bias Detection Day. I'm very, very serious. All right, so the first exercise, the warm-up. We've got regular visits to Wikipedia's fallacies, biases, and distortions. And then the workout, read an extremely falsifiable non-fiction book. Warming up by taking regular visits to have a look at all of these sorts of things, all of the ways that we can be wrong about stuff. Sort of combining the scroll with a goal thing, but for cognitive biases, lists of fallacies, and cognitive distortion. It's funny, as I was putting this together, I was like, do I really need this in there? I'm pretty sure everybody already does this. That was my assumption. Which is all of these problems. I am using the sampling bias of just myself. Proof by example. The curse of knowledge. Faulty generalization. A whole lot of Dunning-Kruger. Egocentric bias. A hasty generalization. I might be right, but I'm probably wrong. All right, so now we get to the workout. Read an extremely falsifiable non-fiction book. This has got to be one of my favorite habits. All right, let's have a look at some Flat Earth FAQ by Eric Dubay. Firstly, I adore this illustration. You definitely get points there. It's beautiful. Inside the book, what you'll find is the constant use of memes as proof, which I believe that he believes this is proof. Where's the edge? It's on NASA's fake moons. Look, son, Earth is a ball. So you look at an argument here, how do flights like Sydney to Santiago work on Flat Earth? Why would you stop in Los Angeles? And anyone who's from a country that doesn't have a big population immediately knows why it's like this. The demand to go from Sydney to Santiago isn't that high. It's an economic decision. But the demand to go from Sydney to Los Angeles is high. And the demand to go from LA to Santiago is high. Because nobody lives down here, dude. All the people live up there. That's where the planes are. Other books include The Case for the Face. It's about that face found on Mars. That one, is it real? A classic, My Contact with Flying Saucers, Dino Craspedon. Breaking the Circle of Satanic Ritual Abuse. Hands, the true account of a hypnotic subject reports on outer space. I adore this. Experiencing reincarnation. Everyone does, remember? Honestly, to this one's credit, he makes a pretty good argument. He's kind of got a point. And then everyone's favorite subject, creationism. This one's real fun. The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved. I love this book. It is just so full of bad logic. And then it just takes this aggressively homophobic turn about halfway. And then it ends. That's basically it. Now, I put this as a workout for getting your bullshit-proof vest on. Because biases, cognitive biases and distortions, they exist everywhere. You can find them everywhere. You'll find like a thousand in this video alone. But seldom do we get a dedicated place to spot them. You know, punching. You can't really just do that everywhere. But a boxing gym, you can. You're meant to. And that is how I see books like this. It's like a simulated training ground. A place that is just abundant with opportunities to spot bullshit and to get good at that skill. So yeah, thoroughly recommend. I love this ----, man. All right, that was our second one. Let's have a look at Mission McClued In. This is about media literacy. Media literacy as a term can sound super annoying and pretentious. Most notably when deployed as a snarky buzzword to win internet fights. But it's actually really cool and helps to insulate you from propaganda, scare tactics, emotional manipulation, information warfare, spin, bullshit, authoritarianism and getting dragged into the aforementioned internet fights. Walker, 2025. That's me, baby. Mission McClued In is about understanding media literacy as mental liberation. It is freeing. And yes, the title is a play on the name of the godfather of media literacy, Marshall McLuhan. Any change in handling information, communication is bound to cause a great readjustment of all the social patterns, the educational patterns, the political power, public opinion patterns. Think of the tremendous shift in political power that is going on at this moment through the use of television in politics. The media literacy warmup here is constantly asking the question, what evidence would change your mind? So easy to get stuck in our ways. It's so easy to just like accept something and it's so easy to believe that we can't change. But I think this is one of the most potent questions ever. And often you'll find that it does lead you to change your mind. I used to think there was a lot of potential in AI, you know, when it came to creativity and potentially even mental health. Like I remember reading this study in 2022 that was about AI chatbots reducing suicidality in people. And I was like, huh, that's super interesting. So I liked it. But I was aware that the evidence that would change my mind would be evidence to the opposite, that it was taking away cognitive skill and that it was making people not feel great. And that evidence is mounting. I don't know if you saw that thing that came out from Wired this week, but OpenAI has estimated that half a million of its users, 500,000 users are experiencing mental problems that could be understood as AI psychosis. Oh, damn man. But yes, what evidence would change your mind? This is really cool for, oh, he's ABC'd again, look at that. Assumptions, beliefs and context. A question like this becomes really helpful in news literacy because that is a place where you are bombarded with evidence, but it's often not all the evidence. Let's put this to the test. We'll have a little quiz. This is going to get dark. There's only one question and it is a dark one. Do you know the death rate from homicide in the United States of America? Out of all the people who die in a given year, what percentage of them are from homicide? Think of a number, keep it in your mind. I'm going to give you two clues. The first will be media coverage as a percentage of death stories from different outlets. So if 100% is every story that they write about US deaths, then say 25 is a quarter of those stories by volume. The second clue is media bias in the United States. AdFontes Media has mapped them on a left to right arc and a reliability arc. And I'm going to use three big newspapers. So the first is New York Times. 42% of their death stories were about homicides. The second is the Washington Post. 46% of their death stories were about homicide. And the third is Fox News. More than half of their death stories were about homicide. All right, got your number? I'm going to reveal the answer. The death rate from homicide in the United States is less than 1%. Less than 1% of all deaths. And this is not an example of left-right media bias, but of what makes the news bias. This is a graph of what Americans die from. Heart disease, 29%. Cancer, 27%. All the way down to homicide, less than 1%. And then it's compared with the causes of death reported on in US media. So as you can see, homicide is the most reported on. Whereas heart disease, that's only 2.3% of the stories. All this to say, sometimes evidence works against us. Now to the workout for our Mission McLuhan. Simple one, read a classic media theory book. Here's five suggestions. On Photography by Susan Sontag. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman. Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. Propaganda by Jacques Ellul. Oh my God, I love this book. And Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky. If you don't know which one to read first, I'd probably recommend Propaganda or Amusing Ourselves to Death. This is slightly more modern. It's written in the mid 80s and it's about how television impacts culture in ways that we just don't know. And it makes you think a lot about what life is like 40 years later. That was our third cognitive workout. Let's have a look at Algorithmic Resistance. Ah, the joys of low-tech inefficient curiosity. Our warm-up, use the Internet Archive and your local library. This is about discovery without the algorithm. And now, curation without the algorithm is our workout. Create your curiosity garden. I mean that. In each case where a new technology emerges, if you like, from the laboratory, the first question to ask is a political question. Namely, for what purposes is this technology to be used? Let's do the warm-up. The Internet Archive is the library of Alexandria. Full stop. It is incredible. It is full of treasure if you go hunting. It's amazing. Sometimes people ask me where I get my clips from. Like, you know, the weird old clips. It's all from here. I'm convinced that there's going to be a bunch of people 30 years from now that are real happy they discovered it. So why do I like it? Well, it has no algorithm. It has no ads. It has no recency bias. You will find all media, old and new. And there is no guidance. There's nobody holding your hand. You just go in and you're in this like vault and it's just interesting things that you would never find anywhere else. And you're like, whoa, man, this is amazing. I think as an Internet Archive power user, I might be one of the few non-Soviets who found out about Lububu because of Cheburashka. Essentially, it is an open world curiosity game. Have a good time. There is also some crazy stuff there. Like they are committed to free speech. So be careful. That is a cause for alarm. And if you like Internet history, they also have the Wayback Machine. God, what a resource. What an incredible resource. One of the peculiarities of a place like the city dump is that it makes you realize that societies reveal themselves in what they threw away. Here you can explore the old Internet, what it used to be like. Personalize your GeoCities URL. When you go through the old web that is archived here, there is that true sense of discovery. You go to a web ring and you'll be like, oh, cool, click on these links. It's amazing. I don't know. You see like websites that look like this. There's a beauty to it. And earlier I talked about NeoCities, the IndieWeb. Mirror, mirror image of the ethos. It's beautiful. Speaking of, let's talk about the workout of algorithmic resistance. Create your curiosity garden. Curation without an algorithm. I'm talking about a digital garden. Your online public space to curate assorted ephemeral treasure, such as cool things you found, new rabbit holes you're exploring, ideas you want to share, projects you've finished, projects you're midway through, projects you want to do, and your evolving thoughts on all of it. But wait, you ask, isn't that just social media? Kind of, except it doesn't take place on social media. And if Marshall McLuhan's words are anything to go by, the medium is the message. That is no small difference. There's this beautiful essay, I really recommend it by Maggie Appleton, about digital gardens and the ethos of it, what it actually means. Because when I first heard the term, I was like, yeah, cool label. What does it do? What's different? And she explains it really well. So if you think about social media, information and content is all timeline-based. The newest stuff gets risen to the top. YouTube is a decent exception, but even still it has a recency bias. Topography-based means all of this stuff, just like a garden, gets planted and grows and becomes something else. You don't look at an old tree and think it's somehow not as valuable as a new tree. You tend to think the opposite. You're like, damn, this is amazing. And that is natural. That's a natural way to think. Social media is weird, man. She places it in the middle of what she calls chaos streams. Yeah, pretty much. And cultivated performance, like really big, intense stuff. This is public. This is learning. This is learning in public. And finally, she talks about the architecture on which it's hosted. It is your own website, just like the IndieWeb. It's avoiding the walled garden of this place. It's something that I'm doing at the moment. I'll make a video about it pretty soon. But yeah, I love this ethos, man. It's great. That's our fourth one. Let's move now to Man Plans and Rod Laughs, which you'll remember is the stretch, relax and unwind day. This is the easy day of the workout. But you might be asking, what does that even mean? Man Plans and Rod Laughs? Isn't it Man Plans and God Laughs? No, I'm talking about Rod Serling. I'm Rod Serling. Yeah, man. How do you do? Just the greatest. The anguish of the human race. The desperate sense of self-destruction that we entertain all the time. The greatest. One of the greatest humans to ever do it. The deep, pervading gloom that comes with our inability to cope. Rod freaking Serling. So yes, our stretch and recover day is literally just watch old episodes of the Twilight Zone. Please sit back and take your first trip into the Twilight Zone. Why the Twilight Zone, you might be asking? Because Rod Serling predicted everything. Even this video, how it started with the MIT study and the atrophying brains with technology. It's the story about a man slowly succumbing to a kind of nightmarish loneliness. The gradual disintegration of mind and body because human beings have that palpable need for companionship. A most benevolent and compassionate official sends the prisoner a, well, a machine. It's a robot that talks and acts like a human being. A robot that thinks like a human being. In a story we call The Lonely. Here's a nice quote from Rod. We're developing a new citizenry. I'm not going to do the voice. Imagine if you will. We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles but won't be able to think. But that's just a quote. Every episode has something relevant to everything that we're going through. Obsolete Man, one of the most famous. Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. The After Hours. Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass in the street? And who could forget? The Brain Center at Whipple's. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. A perfect letter. Not one error or erasure. Typed at the moment of conception. Am I getting through to you, young man? This one doesn't usually make the top episodes of the Twilight Zone lists, but I think it should. Here's the description. Heartless CEO Wallace V. Whipple automates his family-owned factory and lays off most of his workers over the objections of his foreman Dickerson and chief engineer Hanley. That's the premise. Outsourcing everything to machines. What will happen in the Twilight Zone? This is a passive activity that will make your brain do good things. And the game? It happens to be the historical battle between flesh and steel. Between the brain of man and the product of man's brain in the Twilight Zone. In the words of Rod himself, the ultimate obscenity is not caring. Not doing something about what you feel. Not feeling, just drawing back and drawing in. Becoming a narcissist. Human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, it's hard not to do his voice, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be, ultimately, a simple humanity for humanity's sake. Which is why I say, man plans and Rod laughs. There are so many forces that seem out of our control. And when those forces are profit-driven technologies that don't really see us as people, that's terrifying. That's a really scary plan. But Rod Serling reminds me that there are forces out of their control as well. Man plans and Rod laughs. You know it, baby. There are many bromides applicable here. Too much of a good thing, tiger by the tail. As you sow, so shall you reap. The point is that too often, man becomes clever instead of becoming wise. He becomes inventive, but not thoughtful. And sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Whipple, he can create himself right out of existence. Tonight's tale of oddness and obsolescence from the Twilight Zone. And this concludes the cognitive workout, the anticipatory brainwash countermeasures. And it also concludes the video. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you had a really fun time watching that. There are so many relevant links in the description. Check it out. What I would love is for this to be the last video that you watch. If you want to buy my books and support me, that's awesome. These are my books on the screen. And, uh, I don't know, subscribe. But mostly support yourself, man. I know that sounds cheesy, but goddamn, I do mean it. Battles are won in the mind first. So, uh, yeah, look after yourself. Ah, have a beautiful day. Gotcha.