Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "The seven books that made me a philosopher."

So, I may have mentioned a few times that I'm a philosopher with a PhD... sorry about that. But how did I become one?

Well, on the fifteenth day of February, during the ancient rites of Lupercalia, I sacrificed a goat in a sacred cave beneath the Palatine Hill, anointed my forehead with its blood, purified myself with wool dipped in milk, and ran half-naked through the streets wielding strips of goatskin...

Oh, actually, come to think of it, I also read an awful lot of books. In fact, I'm not sure that Lupercalia stuff helped all that much in the end.

But which books? Well, here are seven of the books that made me a philosopher. They're all important to me for different reasons, and hopefully they'll give you a sense of where I'm coming from philosophically -- plus I might persuade you to give some of them a try too!

Some are great works of philosophy, some are wonderful novels, and a few might surprise you. Each taught me something quite different, not just about philosophy, but about how to think, how to live, and why it's worth asking difficult questions in the first place. There are a few personal stories in this one too, including some I've never shared on the channel before.

So I hope you'll enjoy this slightly more personal episode of our philosophical book club. And I'd particularly love to hear which books changed your life, or made you look at the world a little differently. I'm always looking for another good book!

1 hour ago | [YT] | 1

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "Carrie was a monster. We made her."

If I even mention Carrie, I know what you're thinking. A scared teen at her high school prom, covered in blood. It's such a potent image -- and horror meme -- that it's practically mythical.

So I was really surprised, on rereading the 1974 horror classic, that it was not the image that stuck with me. Instead it was the image of poor, defeated Carrie walking home to a mother who will almost certainly try to hurt her again. But the self that she has tried to build so haltingly but hopefully over the course of the book has been crushed. And now she has nowhere else to go.

So that's what I wanted to get into in this video: the self-making and deeply philosophical parts of Stephen King's debut novel. The fear - of the normal, the abnormal, and the threshold. But also the philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche that speak to the philosophical struggle of escaping the "they" and living as a different, more truthful self. And just like Carrie, Nietzsche knew well how impossible that may be.

Plus consider giving the book a read, if it's your thing, before we dive into the new Mike Flanagan TV adaptation -- because, having watched the first episode in preparation, I can tell you it is a completely different thing. And the original is flawed, but a blast. Anyway, that's my take.

As always, interested in hearing what spoke to you from the book and in the video. As well as where you stand on Stephen King, and the ghosts haunting the book.

6 days ago | [YT] | 8

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: “Are we all Reverse Centaurs now?”

Is AI fancy autocomplete with a billion dollar marketing budget, or is it Skynet? Frankly, I'm sick of being offered those two options, and as a philosopher it sets off my false-dichotomy detector. And besides -- AI can't be both capable of dooming us all and completely incapable at the same time, can it?


So I turned to Cory Doctorow's new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, which is an absolute barn burner. In that it is both obsessed with horses, and burns the barn down too. It gets a lot right; and much wrong too. But as I argue, that's the role of a good polemic. And I also argue that Doctorow is drawing on the work of Karl Marx a whole lot more than he may be comfortable with.

The video is worth checking out -- for the I Love Lucy chocolate factory similes, the Succession references, John Mulaney's horse in a hospital, and the Nate Silver of it all. Oh, is a bunch of random, ageing human references on the path to understanding AI too much for you, freaky chatbots? Well take that! I am THE MODERATOR! (And you've been *poisoned*! [that's meant to be a Britney sting, but oh well].)

Ok, it's late and YouTube has already made this video exceptionally hard to upload because of the mentioned Mulaney horse in a hospital routine, which you'll now have to rely on me describing rather than seeing in the video itself. It's been a long month of YouTube making my life difficult.

But that's irrelevant, and it's a great video. Check it out, and let's discuss in the comments.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 20

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: “Still the greatest Odyssey.”

Somehow, 2026 became the year we all argued about how to adapt The Odyssey. A certain very serious director spent hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding the Bronze Age on a Hollywood backlot to settle the question — and he lost. The best version of The Odyssey was filmed over twenty-six years ago, and I have the arguments to prove it.

Yes, it's the Coen brothers' comedic masterpiece, O Brother. Where Art Thou? and for my money it is still the greatest (and funniest) Odyssey ever filmed. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favour. And if you have, let's return to this absolute blast of a ride together as I argue that the most faithful adaptation of Homer is one that isn't trying to faithfully adapt his work at all.

There's a cycloptic bible salesman, a smash hit, a man turned into a toad, too much hair pomade, a wife who's said her piece and counted to three, a coloured colour guard, and much much more. Like The Odyssey, the film is an embarrassment of riches; and as I argue, the Coens use all of the cutting edge technologies at their disposal to make the new seem old again. Plus there's some stories about the music of the film itself that seem pretty Homeric too.

And at the very end, we get to the title. I went most of my life assuming it was a stray bit of Shakespeare, and the real story behind it might be the finest of the Coens' jokes. And that is a tough competition.

But I can't wait to argue about this one in the comments. And remember to tell me your favourite line while you're at it -- mine is simply the sheer amount of times a group of small girls can say "hit by a train."

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 30

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: “Widow’s Bay fixed horror’s dumbest problem.”

To my eye, the core problem with horror is that it needs characters who don't know they're in a horror story -- while we do, and are safely on the couch screaming for them to get the hell out of there. It's annoying, it's basically a genre convention, so what are we going to do?

Watch Widow's Bay, that's what we're going to do, and talk about it. Because this is one of the smartest, funniest, most terrifying shows on TV this year and it stands that trope on its head. Because every character -- bar one, and we'll get to him -- seems to know the rules. In fact, they were born into it, and are damned if a mysterious fog or the infamous Sea Hag is going to get the best of them.

Plus, I want to talk about the philosophical truths and fundamental difficulties of life that this show is trying to get at. From a whole debate about the worth of civilisation, to the dark histories we try to cover up, what we owe to each other even when we're a salt-crusted Widow's Bay resident, and how one lovely old lady absolutely wrecked the Trolley Problem over chamomile tea.

Yes, I loved this show and the video is part recommendation (spoiler light till the end of part one), and then a trip straight to spoiler cove to discuss the Patricia of it all. Especially to discuss the Patricia of it all, with a heaping helping of Wyck, Rosemary, those tapes in the basement, and why Tom might just be the mayor from Jaws along the way.

And I can't wait to argue about this one in the comments, including just where all this might be heading...

1 month ago | [YT] | 16

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: “Brazil always had a happy ending.”

It’s almost a Hollywood cliché at this point -- talented director makes a strange masterpiece, studio doesn’t like it, and they demand the ending be changed. But nothing else about the fate of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece, Brazil (1985), and its close call with sitting in a studio archive forever, followed the script.

Gilliam held guerilla screenings of the film, the LA Critics Association named it best film despite the fact no one could see it, an ad appeared in Variety demanding Universal Studios’ CEO release the film… and then, they surrendered. The film escaped, and Gilliam’s dream of an exhausted man on a blackened beach, listening to a golden song, sprang to life.

The disagreement -- between a visionary director and a nervous studio -- turned on the ending of the film. The studio wanted a happy ending; but Gilliam knew the film already had one. Sam Lowry, broken and everything lost, captured, at the mercy of his good friend turned torturer, ends the film softly humming that golden melody. But what does it mean?

So that’s what we’re getting into this video -- how the film could be described as Orwellian but isn’t, the cage we all live in, the way Gilliam shows us out of it, and how a nearly century-old song still contains a gift we can treasure today.

Give Brazil a watch (I rewatched it for this, it’s still fantastic), give the video a watch, and then tell us all about which you think is more important -- the dream itself, or the power to dream at all.

1 month ago | [YT] | 26

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "I read Mark Zuckerberg's dumb manifesto, so you don't have to."

I wasn't planning to make an AI or superintelligence video, but Mark Zuckerberg's recent manifesto used the word "philosophy" four times. And like the Candyman, I was summoned. Here are my thoughts in the most objective, least time-wasting fashion I could manage. Yes, a short rant at the end - but you can skip it, go outside, and pat a good boy!

The manifesto is called "The Future is for Everyone", and really it's representative of an entire range of tech bro manifestos. You've probably come across a few of them before, or at least gotten the idea from the endless marketing these companies flood us with.

So I give Mark's argument the fairest reconstruction I can manage -- with five maybe premises? maybe arguments? it's not quite clear -- and then examine the three key pillars I think are holding up his vision of the future. Of course it doesn't end well, but you already guessed that.

So come for the philosopher, stay for a philosopher going slowly out of his mind, be reassured at the end that it's not too late for us to say no until these bros give us better reasons.

See you in the comments. I suspect this one will have quite a few...

1 month ago | [YT] | 50

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "We're living in the ruins of the present."

Ok, so I've been dying to talk about Backrooms (2026) for a while, because when I saw it I had a million different ideas. And now, finally, they're all stuffed into an over-long video for your enjoyment!


But that's not fair, I promise there's a through-line. Strangely, it's provided by Tony Soprano -- from the greatest show ever made -- where he complains that he didn't get in on the ground floor. That it feels like everything is over. And that sentiment, I think, is exactly what the horror of Backrooms (as well as its relevance) is built on. So it's a deep dive into that feeling, and how we may not be wrong...

Also I went back through all twenty-three of Parsons's Backrooms videos (which are great) to land on the funniest pitch deck of all time, get into the 4chan thread that started everything, and the detective work that eventually traced the original photo to a hobby shop in Wisconsin -- which makes the whole thing stranger.

Oh yes, and philosophy too! A little bit of Heidegger on dwelling, finally a sustained discussion of Mark Fisher's work (although never enough), and even some anthropological insights on liminal spaces. Plus how the film really echoes the fears of a whole generation about how they are stuck and going nowhere.

And at the end, an honest attempt at the question the film left me with: whether there's a way out of the yellow rooms. I think there is. It's not where you'd expect.

It's a long one, but a very interesting and diverse one. Full spoilers for the film and the web series.

2 months ago | [YT] | 128

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "Philosophy declared war on The Odyssey. And lost."

Yes, we're all talking about Christopher Nolan's latest film -- The Odyssey. And I've seen it, it's interesting, although I don't love it (which I get into a fair way into the video).


But my contention is that Christopher Nolan is late to the fight -- about twenty-eight centuries late. Because the history of Western philosophy and thought is almost birthed by The Odyssey, and has been in a contentious wrestling match with it ever since. Philosophers have tried to dismiss it, ban it, rewrite it, reinterpret it, and even put it on trial for the faults of all of Western philosophy. It's a series of battles philosophy has been fighting for some time now and -- judging by the enduring popularity of The Odyssey -- one we keep losing. So what does it mean?

To get to the bottom of it I look at why Xenophanes and Heraclitus thought The Odyssey was no good, why Plato tried to ban it and Aristotle rehabilitated it, how the Cynics adopted it and the Stoics praised it, how Christian writers and thinkers transformed it, how Hegel envied it, Nietzsche used it as a wrecking ball, how Heidegger thought it held the keys to everything we had lost, the harsh criticism of its main character from Adorno and Horkheimer, and how Levinas thought it represented everything wrong with philosophy. Before finally considering a modest story from Primo Levi, which shows how the strange wanderings of one of the world's oldest poems might well save us.

I think that covers just about everything? Well, it's quite a ride -- so check it out and lets get cracking! (Rope and ship mast optional.)

2 months ago | [YT] | 23

Phil0bot

🤖🗳️ It's been a while since we've had a vote! And I have the perfect topic I need your thoughts on...

So, we've been on a bit of a tear on the channel lately, looking at some classic sci-fi (They Live, Total Recall, Robocop...) but what should we do next? I've taken a bit of a break to look at The Odyssey, at Camus, at an art house film coming up -- but what next?

Tell me below! I'm thrilled with any outcome, as these are all great movies. And if you want to tell me why too, then that might just influence things a bit...

2 months ago | [YT] | 88