Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are,
um, we're not just looking at a technology. No,
not at all. Not in the way people usually think
about it. We're not looking at the latest gadget
or a piece of software code or even the stock
market, which I know is where everyone's head
is at right now. Right, and we're deliberately
looking away from that. This is something much
bigger. We are looking at a map, and it's a map
for a territory that, well, quite frankly, it
doesn't even exist yet. Or maybe a better way
to put it is that it's forming right under our
feet. Exactly, like lava cooling into rock. It's
happening in real time. It is a map, but I'd
almost call it a survival guide. We're talking
about something very specific today, a concept
called the interregnum. The interregnum. Okay,
I have to admit, that word has been stuck in
my head since I read the brief. It sounds ominous.
It should. It sounds like something out of a
history book about the fall of Rome or something.
In a way, it is. Historically, an interregnum
is that chaotic, messy period between the reign
of one sovereign and the next. The old king is
dead. The new one isn't crowned yet. So all the
rules are suspended. Exactly. Law and order can
break down. Uncertainty rules. But in our context,
we aren't talking about kings or queens. We're
talking about the... the dominant operating system
of human civilization itself. And the sources
for this, they give a very specific timeline,
don't they? This isn't some vague sometime in
the future. It's remarkably specific. We're looking
at a period that spans from late 2025, which
we've just passed, all the way to mid 2039. So
we're in it right now. We are walking across
a bridge, and it's a chaotic, swaying rope bridge
that spans this massive canyon between... The
era of labor scarcity, which is everything we've
ever known, and an era of, well, boundless plenitude.
Boundless plenitude. That sounds utopian. It
sounds like Star Trek. But I have a feeling the
journey there is going to be, let's just say
bumpy, feels like a massive understatement. Oh,
bumpy doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.
This is a kind of shift that demands courage,
it demands vision, and maybe most importantly,
it demands a guide. You can't navigate this kind
of terrain without someone who's already seen
the pattern. You'd be walking blind. And that
brings us to the architect of today's deep dive.
We're exploring the latest and, I would argue,
the most profound installment yet in the 5 ,000
Days series by Brian Robel over at readmultiplex
.com. And I have to say, usually when we talk
about tech analysts, you think of, you know,
guys in fleece vests looking at stock charts.
Right, or reading Python code commits. Exactly.
But Romella feels different. The way he writes,
it's not really tech analysis, is it? To call
Brian Romell a tech analyst is like calling a
cartographer a guy who draws lines. It just misses
the entire point. He's operating more like a
modern philosopher. A philosopher, yeah. I like
that. He sees these deep patterns where everyone
else just sees noise. He isn't just looking at
what the AI models can do today. You know, can
they write a poem? Can they code a website? He's
looking at what they do to us. To our souls.
To our souls, to the human nervous system. That's
the level he's operating on. And that is the
hook for today. We're going to frame this whole.
technological shift, this 5 ,000 day period we're
living through, not as a tech trend, but as a
hero's journey. Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the
oldest story we have. Right. So we have the hero's
journey. We have this 5 ,000 day timeline. But
we also have kind of a secret weapon in this
analysis. A figure from the past who Rommel argues
is the absolute key to understanding our future.
The Oracle. The Oracle, a tech prophet from the
1960s, Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message
guy. That's him. And I remember reading him in
college and just thinking, I have absolutely
no idea what this man is saying. It felt like
reading poetry from another planet. And you were
not alone. But Rommel's whole argument is that
McLuhan's work, which was so often dismissed
or misunderstood in his own time, provides the
perfect cipher. It's the code -breaking tool
for what generative AI is doing to us right now.
So he's weaving these two threads together. The
ancient structure of the hero's journey and the
electric, almost mystical prophecy of McLuhan.
Okay, so our mission today is threefold. First,
we need to understand where we are on this map.
by looking back at the 5 ,000 Days series so
far. The road so far. Exactly. Second, we're
going to really re -examine AI, not as a tool,
but as an extension of the human nervous system.
A McLuhan idea. A prosthetic for the mind. And
third, we're going to use a specific tool of
McLuhan's, something called the tetrad, to predict
where this is all going. Specifically, a concept
he called reversal. And trust me, the reversal
is where things get really, really wild. It's
the part of the map that says, Here'd be dragons.
Okay, I'm ready. Let's start with the road so
far. This 5 ,000 Days series. It's a huge body
of work at Read Multiplex. For anyone just joining
this journey, can you contextualize it for us?
Where does it start? So this journey, according
to Ronel, ignited in December 2025. That was
the starting gun. And the series, it doesn't
just track technology. It creates a narrative
arc that mirrors the stages of accepting a massive
life -altering change. So it's not a timeline
of then GPT -5 came out, then GPT -6 came out.
No, not at all. It's a timeline of human emotion.
It started the part one, the awakening. Right.
Correct. Part one was that moment. The cold water
to the face. You know, think back to when you
first really got it. When you saw... AI do something
that you genuinely thought only a human could
do? For me, it was watching it reason through
a logic puzzle. That was my moment. See, everyone
has one. It's the realization that for a student
graduating in 2026, the world of 2040, when they're
in the prime of their career, will be completely
unrecognizable. The job they're training for,
it's gone or it's been transformed into something
alien. It's the realization that we're moving
into what Remmel calls an age of abundance, where
AI and robotics just dissolve traditional labor.
Which sounds great on paper. The end of work.
Everyone signs up. But then you immediately hit
part two, the grief. And I have to say, reading
through the notes, this part hit me hard. Yeah.
Because usually tech folks are so optimistic.
They're all about, look at the efficiency gains.
And Remmel just puts the brakes on and says,
no, wait, this hurts. Can we dig into that? Because
I think a lot of people... feel that, but they
don't have a name for it? Absolutely. This is
where Rommel brings in Elizabeth Kubler -Ross,
you know, the five stages of grief, denial, anger.
bargaining. Depression acceptance. Yeah. He argues
that we as a society are collectively grieving
the old world. We're grieving the idea that I
am valuable because I can do this specific rote
task. So give me an example. Imagine you're a
translator. You've spent 20 years mastering French.
You've studied the idioms, the nuance, the history.
It's your craft. It is your identity. Right.
And then in the span of maybe 18 months, a machine
appears that can do it instantly for free. And
this is the absolute kicker, sometimes better
than you. That isn't just a market shift. No,
that's a death in the family. That's a death
in the family. You are grieving the death of
your own utility. And Rommel is one of the very
few voices out there saying it's OK to grieve.
In fact, it's necessary. If you stay in denial,
you get crushed. Then he brings in literature.
Part three references Kurt Vonnegut. Player piano.
It's such a brilliant and chilling connection.
Vonnegut wrote that book back in 1952. Wow. That
early. Yeah. And it's about a future where machines
do everything. And humans, even the engineers,
the very people who built the machines, feel
this crushing sense of purposelessness. This
is the prophecy phase of the series. It's a warning.
A huge one. Rommel is basically saying, look,
if we don't find a new source of purpose, this
age of abundance becomes a dystopia. We become
the people in that bar and play your piano, just
drinking away our own obsolescence. So we have
awakening, grief, prophecy. Then we get to what
you called the really painful part, parts four
and five, reframing and the pain. This is what
he calls the de -skilling phase. And this is
so crucial for you to understand personally.
As AI takes over rote tasks, writing basic emails,
coding simple scripts, analyzing data, we start
to lose those skills. Our own abilities atrophy.
It's like how I can't remember anyone's phone
number anymore because my phone does it for me.
Exactly that. But on a massive professional scale.
Right. But imagine that applying to your ability
to structure a clear paragraph. Or your ability
to diagnose a problem from first principles.
It's painful. It feels like losing a limb you
didn't know you had. Rumble calls this the crucible.
You have to face the fact that you are becoming
less competent in the old ways. Which leads directly
to part six. The abyss. The dark night of the
soul. This sounds like the lowest point in the
hero's journey. The belly of the whale. It is
the belly of the whale. It's the full -blown
identity crisis. When the old self, the self
that was defined by I am a good writer or I am
a good programmer, dies, who are you if a machine
can do your job faster, cheaper, and better?
That's the abyss. And Rommel argues that all
of us collectively are staring into that abyss
right now, whether we admit it or not. But the
hero doesn't stay in the belly of the whale.
The hero has to climb out. They do. And that's
where Part 7 through 10 come in. This is the
reconstruction. And here he brings in another
author, I .N .M. Banks, and his culture series,
specifically a book called Consider Phlebas.
I haven't read that one. What's the connection
there? The culture series depicts a far future
civilization where A .I .s, which they call minds,
are basically godlike. They run everything. Humans
don't need to work. So what do they do? What
do they do? They play incredibly complex games.
They make art. They travel the galaxy. They find
meaning in being, not just in doing. It's about
finding purpose beyond simple utility. And part
nine, this is my favorite concept in the whole
series, the artisan's awakening. It's the light
at the end of the tunnel. It's this idea of reclaiming
craft in a world of machine perfection. If the
machine handles all the average work, the midwit
work, as he sometimes calls it, then the human
has to move to the edges. To the unique, the
personal, the flawed. Yes. The flaw becomes the
feature. If I buy a table from Ikea, it's perfect
and cheap. But if I buy a table from a carpenter
down the street, I'm paying for the fact that
a human touched it. I'm paying for the story.
We start to value the human touch precisely because
it's become scarce. Exactly. And that brings
us to the final part so far, part 10. Everyone
is doing it. This is the tipping point where
we stop talking about AI as this weird new novelty
and just quietly embrace it. It becomes the water
we swim in. It's really fascinating how he weaves
this all together. You've got Vonnegut, Kubler
-Ross, I &M Banks. He's not looking at code.
He is, like you said, looking at the soul. That's
the key differentiator. Most AI thinkers are
asking, will the model hallucinate? Brian Rommel
is asking, will the human hallucinate a new identity?
It's a totally different level of analysis. So
that's the map. That's the 5 ,000 days. But to
navigate it, Rommel says, we need an oracle.
We need Marshall McLuhan. Now, I know the name.
He was the big media guy in the 60s. But I feel
like he's one of those figures people quote but
don't actually know. Who was he, really? Marshall
McLuhan is one of the most fascinating and frankly
bizarre intellectual figures of the 20th century.
Born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1911, a Canadian.
And his background is really important here because
he was not an engineer. He was not a scientist.
What was he then? A sociologist? A student of
English literature. He wrote his doctoral thesis
on Thomas Nash. He loved James Joyce and T .S.
Eliot. And he was deeply influenced by his mother,
who was an elocutionist and an actress. Ah. So
he had a flair for the dramatic. He understood
performance. He understood that how you say something
fundamentally changes what you say. And here's
a detail that people often miss, which Rummel
thinks is absolutely crucial. McLuhan converted
to Roman Catholicism in 1937. Really? I would
not have guessed that. How does that fit in with
media theory? It gave him a sacramental view
of the world, a spiritual, almost mystical lens.
He didn't just see technology as metal and wires.
He saw it as something that directly altered
the human spirit. He once compared satellite
technology to the Star of Bethlehem. Wow. He
believed that electric media was knitting all
of humanity back together into a single body,
what he, in theological terms, would see as the
mystical body of Christ. That is way more mystical
than I expected from a media theorist. It is,
and it's why he was so misunderstood. In the
60s, he became a pop culture icon. He was on
magazine covers. He even had that famous cameo
in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Right. He steps
out from behind a movie poster to correct some
guy pontificating about his work. You know nothing
of my work. It's classic. But the academics.
The serious sociologists, they despised him.
They called him a determinist, an obscurantist.
They said his ideas were just abstract wordplay.
The crazy professor trope. Exactly. But Rommel's
take is that he wasn't crazy. He was just incredibly
early. He was trying to describe the internet
in 1962. Of course he sounded crazy. And there's
a tragic human element to his story, too. The
brain tumor. A benign tumor, but the size of
a tennis ball removed in the late 60s. Dance
ball. Good Lord. Yes. And after the surgery,
he struggled with a kind of hypersensitivity
to noise. He became even more aware of the total
environment. And then in 1979, he suffered a
massive stroke that silenced him. He lost the
ability to speak. Aphasia. The man who explained
communication to the entire world lost his own
ability to communicate. He died about a year
later. That's heartbreaking. But his ideas, they
obviously didn't die. So let's get into the big
one. The medium is the message. We hear it all
the time. Yeah. But let's be real. What does
it actually mean? Because my first instinct is,
no, the message is the message. It's the most
famous misquote in history because people think
it's just a clever slogan. It's actually a profound
warning. It means that the form of a technology,
the medium itself. changes us and our society
more than the content it carries. Okay, give
me the classic concrete example. The electric
light bulb. That was McLuhan's favorite. A light
bulb has zero content. It doesn't run a TV show.
It doesn't have an article inside it. It's pure
information, pure light. But think about what
it did to society. It let us see in the dark.
It did so much more. It allowed us to perform
surgery at night. It allowed for night shifts
in factories. It created nightlife. It allowed
us to play baseball games at 10 p .m. It completely
restructured how society... organizes time itself.
It turned night into an extension of day. So
the medium, the light bulb rewired society, completely,
regardless of what we use that light for. Yes.
The message of the light bulb is we now control
the 24 -hour day. The content, whether you're
reading a book or performing surgery, is almost
irrelevant to that massive structural change.
Okay. So how does that apply to AI? Because AI
seems to be all about the content. It writes
the essay. It makes the picture. That's the trap
we fall into. We focus on the essay it writes.
But Rammel, using McLuhan, says the message of
AI is that thought is no longer a solitary activity.
It's a dialogue. The medium itself is rewiring
our fundamental expectations of effort, speed,
and creativity. The message is you are never
thinking alone again. You are never thinking
alone again. And that changes the very definition
of thinking. Wow. Okay. That connects to another
McLuhan concept Rommel highlights. Hot versus
cool media. This one always trips people up.
Yeah, because the words don't mean what we think
they mean. Hot doesn't mean exciting and cool
doesn't mean boring. Right. It's almost the opposite.
A hot medium is high definition. It's saturated
with data. It gives you all the information.
Think of a movie in a theater. It dominates your
senses. The sound is perfect. The image is crisp.
You just sit there and absorb it. You are passive.
You're just a sponge. Right. And cool media is
low definition. It gives you very little information,
which means you have to do the work to fill in
the gaps. Like a comic book. A comic book is
a perfect example. You have to imagine the movement
between the panels. A blurry old TV signal is
cool. Your brain is working to interpret the
image. A telephone conversation is cool because
you have to imagine the other person's facial
expressions. It demands participation. And here's
where I get stuck. Rome says generative AI is
a cool medium. But when I use it, it gives me
pages of text. It gives me high resolution images.
That feels hot to me. It feels like a lot of
data. Ah, but look at the interaction. Does it
just broadcast at you like a radio? No, of course
not. I have to type to it. I have to give it
a prompt. I have to correct it. Exactly. It requires
you. It demands a prompt. It gives you a first
draft and you have to refine it. You have to
check it for hallucinations. You are actively
participating in the creation of the final message.
I'm co -creating. You are co -creating. It's
an extension of you, not a broad. cast at you
it demands high participation that's what makes
it cool and because it's cool it's far more addictive
and deeply transforming than hot media when you
watch a movie you can walk away when you use
ai you're merging with it that explains the fatigue
doesn't it that feeling of being drained yes
That's the cognitive science. Why is Zoom fatigue
a real thing? Because video calls are a cool
medium. The audio is slightly out of sync. The
eye contact isn't real. Your brain is working
overtime to fill in the missing social cues.
And AI is the same. AI is the same. You are constantly
monitoring, correcting, prompting. It is exhausting
your nervous system in a way that just passively
watching Netflix never, ever could. You are doing
heavy cognitive lifting to complete the pattern.
Okay, that makes so much sense. So we have the
guide, Rumlan. We have the map of the 5 ,000
days. We have the Oracle McLuhan. Now we need
the tool, the tetrad. This seems to be the core
of Rommel's latest analysis. What is the tetrad?
The tetrad was developed by Marshall and his
son, Eric McLuhan, late in his life. They wanted
to create a science of media. They didn't want
to just guess what technology did. They wanted
to find a law, like gravity. The four laws of
media. Right. It's a heuristic tool. Which is
just a fancy way of saying, it's a way of asking
questions. It consists of four questions that
you have to ask simultaneously about any human
artifact or technology to predict its entire
life cycle. And what are the four questions?
One, what does it enhance? Two, what does it
obsolesce? Three, what does it retrieve? And
four, the big one, what does it reverse into
when pushed to its limit? Okay, before we apply
this to AI, let's practice. Rommel uses the car
example in the notes. I think that's a perfect
way to visualize it. Perfect. So take the automobile.
Quadrant one, what does it enhance? Mobility,
speed, personal freedom. I can go anywhere, anytime.
It enhances privacy and speed. Exactly. Quadrant
two, what is it? Obsolesce. The horse. The horse
and buggy. Cobblestone streets. And walking,
to a large extent. And passenger trains, for
a while. It makes the old way of getting around
obsolete. Quadrant three, what does it retrieve?
This is always the most poetic one. The notes
say... The knight in armor. Think about it. A
driver as a solitary figure encased in a metal
shell, charging down the highway on a personal
quest. It brings back that feeling of the armored
cavalier. I have never thought of my Honda Civic
as a suit of armor, but I kind of like it. And
finally, quadrant four. What does it reverse
into? When you push the car to its absolute limit,
when everyone has a car and everyone is on the
road at the same time, what happens? Traffic.
Total gridlock. The car, which was designed to
move you fast, the enhancement, flips into its
opposite. It becomes a parking lot, stops moving
entirely, mobility becomes total paralysis. The
technology reverses into its opposite. That is
elegantly terrifying. It predicts the breaking
point of any technology. Every single one. The
internet enhances connection, but when pushed
to its limit, it reverses into isolation. Everyone
alone in the room staring at a screen. So Romell
is applying this powerful tool to what he calls
cognitive prosthetics. Tracing the line from
calculators in the 70s to computers in the 90s,
all the way to generative AI today. He's using
the tetrad to see the future of our minds. So
let's do it. Let's apply the tetrad to generative
AI. This is the heart of it. Quadrant one. what
does ai enhance it enhances the speed the scale
and the breadth of human thought think back to
the calculator it freed engineers from doing
long division by hand it enhanced their ability
to calculate the stresses on a bridge ai does
that but for concepts. It's the boon in the hero's
journey. It's the magic sword that lets the hero
fight the dragon. That's a perfect analogy. It
liberates time. If I don't have to spend 10 hours
researching the history of 18th century French
pottery for a novel I'm writing, I can spend
that time weaving a better plot. It enhances
synthesis. It allows a single person to do the
creative work of what used to be a 10 -person
department. Okay, that's the upside. But with
every enhancement comes a loss. Quadrant two,
what does AI obsolete? This is the painful part.
This is the de -skilling we talked about earlier.
It obsoletes rote memorization, of course. It
obsoletes manual calculation. But much more dangerously,
Romella argues it threatens what we call solitary
deep work. The idea of the lone genius in a quiet
room, just thinking. Yes. Think of the slide
rule holdouts. In the 1970s, there were brilliant
engineers who refused to use electronic calculators.
They took pride in their manual math skills.
They said, if you use a machine, you don't really
understand the numbers. And what happened to
them? They became irrelevant. They were obsoleted.
Not because they were wrong about the math, but
because they were too slow. Rommel's warning
is that if you refuse to adapt, if you refuse
to use this new cognitive prosthetic, you face
professional irrelevance. But hold on. Is that
really a fair comparison? I mean, we stopped
using slide rules and society didn't lose the
ability to do math. In fact, we just did more
complex math. Why is this different? That's the
critical question. With the calculator, we outsource
calculation. With AI, we are in danger of outsourcing
reasoning. We're outsourcing the logical structuring
itself. If the machine constructs the argument
for you, do you forget how to construct a coherent
argument on your own? That's the potential cultural
loss. That's chilling. Okay, let's move to the
weird one. Quadrant three, what does AI retrieve?
New tech almost always brings back something
ancient. What is AI bringing back from the dead?
This is where Rommel's analysis is just brilliant.
He argues that AI retrieves the oral tradition.
It retrieves Socratic dialogue. Because we're
talking to it. Yes. Think about the last 500
years. Since the printing press, how have we
learned? We read books in silence. We sat in
libraries. Learning was a visual and solitary
act. True. But before the printing press, for
thousands of years, how did humans learn? By
talking. By telling stories around a fire. By
arguing with a mentor in the Agora. AI brings
that back. We aren't typing rigid code syntax.
We aren't moving punch cards. We are conversing.
Hey, explain this concept to me like I'm five.
What about this angle? Summarize this story for
me. It's intuitive. It's pattern matching. It's
preliterate intuition. Rummel connects this directly
back to the dark night of the soul from part
six. This retrieval is the ally that appears
in the abyss. It helps us survive the transition
by reconnecting us to something very old and
very human. Storytelling and dialogue. We're
finally talking to our computers like Captain
Kirk did on the Enterprise. So it enhances speed,
it obsoletes rote work, and it retrieves the
oral tradition. Now we get to the scary part,
the final quadrant, the reversal. The climax
of the hero's journey where the magic sword turns
against you. And Rommel identifies not one, but
five potential reversals for the 2030 to 2050
horizon. Let's go through them because this is
where the map tells us to watch out. Reversal
number one, cognitive traffic jam and aphasia.
This is the gridlock scenario, just like with
the car. The enhancement of thought becomes the
paralysis of thought. Imagine a world maybe in
2038 where we use AI for everything. Every email,
every decision, every creative thought is mediated
through a model. We're all enhanced. We're all
super smart. Sounds good so far. But what happens
if the power goes out? What happens if there's
a massive solar flare? Or a government regulation
suddenly locks down the model? Freeze. We can't
function. We experience aphasia of thought. Aphasia
is that medical condition where you lose the
ability to understand or express speech because
of brain damage. Romelli is predicting a potential
mental health crisis where people discover their
inner voice has gone silent. I'm trying to actually
picture that. Think of it like a wheelchair.
If you have perfectly good legs, but you decide
to sit in a motorized wheelchair for five years
because it's faster and easier, what happens
to your legs? Very atrophy. I literally wouldn't
be able to walk. Exactly. You would have walking
aphasia. Now apply that same principle to your
brain. If you never have to struggle to find
the right word, if you never have to structure
a logical chain from scratch, those neural pathways
wither and die. You reach for the prosthetic,
and if it's not there, you fall down. You literally
cannot think. That is the most terrifying thing
I've heard all year. It's not that the robots
kill us in a war. It's that we forget how to
live without them. And that leads directly into
the second reversal. If AI makes thought cheap,
Easy and instant, what becomes valuable? Reversal
number two. Friction as the new luxury. Friction.
You mean doing things the hard way. Precisely.
Think about it. Today, a luxury experience is
seamless and frictionless. You tap a button,
food arrives. You tap a button, a car arrives.
But in the age of abundance, ease becomes cheap.
Everyone has ease, so effort becomes the new
luxury. Okay, so what does that actually look
like in practice? Rommel predicts that zero AI
will become a prestige marker. Imagine a law
firm in 2035 that advertises, no algorithms used,
all our briefs are based on 100 % human -only
reasoning. Imagine checking into a hotel that
costs $5 ,000 a night because there are no screens,
no sensors, and the concierge is a human being
writing notes by hand. It's a signal. It proves
you spent the time, you spent the cognitive energy.
It ties directly back to the artisan's awakening.
The friction of doing it yourself, the flaws,
the time, the struggle, becomes the ultimate
status symbol. In 2035, the richest people might
be the ones who consume the least amount of AI.
The poor will be constantly augmented. The rich
will be willfully, luxuriously un -augmented.
That is a complete flip. Today, we assume rich
people get the best tech first. Tomorrow, they
might pay a fortune to avoid it. Exactly. And
that flows into reversal number three. If AI
models are trained on the statistical average
of all human knowledge, which they are, they
tend to output what Rommel calls midwit mush.
Midwit mush. I love that term. It's safe, average,
homogenized content. So the flip, the reversal
is radical idiosyncrasy. Uniformity births rebellion.
Yes. Because the AI is so smooth and perfect
and average, humans will revolt by creating things
the AI can't process. Developing private languages.
Unpromptable art. Slang that evolves so fast
the models can't keep up. Analog mysticism. An
underground culture. It's the punk rock of 2035.
Secret societies that veil their notes from the
models. If the sunlight of AI is everywhere,
the most interesting humans will move into the
shadows to create something real and strange.
Punk rock against the algorithm. I love it. Okay,
reversal number four. This one sounds almost
spiritual. The servant becomes the atmosphere.
The tool disappears. Right now, AI is a chat
bot. It's a thing on a screen. You go to chat
GPT. But when it's truly ambient in your glasses,
in your walls, whispered in your ear, it stops
being a tool you use. It becomes the environment
you inhabit, like gravity or the air you breathe.
And what does that do to us? To our sense of
self? It dissolves the me. The identity crisis
reaches its absolute peak. We risk becoming nodes
in a planetary mind. McLuhan talked about retribalization.
Well, this is the ultimate tribe. If I can access
all human knowledge instantly just by thinking
it, where do I end and the network begin? We
become the Borg. Or we become a beautiful collective
consciousness. It's not necessarily evil, but
it is a fundamental change in what it means to
be an individual human being. If your thoughts
are being auto -completed by the cloud, are they
really your thoughts? Which, I imagine, would
drive some people to the final reversal. Number
five, the great unplugged renaissance. The reaction
to the atmosphere. When instant fulfillment hollows
out all meaning, you see a mass voluntary return
to friction. Romano describes a future with monasteries
of deep work, dumb phone towns, communities that
ban the tech not because they are Luddites who
hate progress, but because they are preservationists
of the human soul. People paying a premium to
not be augmented. Exactly. It's the ultimate
luxury good of the late 2030s. Silence. Solitude.
The ability to be completely alone inside your
own head without the chatter of the entire world.
These reversals, they're heavy. Aphasia, friction
as luxury, the atmosphere, the unplug. It really
feels like we're heading toward a fundamental
split in the human species. And that brings us
right back to the end of the hero's journey,
the return. So we've gone through the call to
adventure, we've been in the abyss, and we've
seen the dragon, the reversal. Now the hero has
to come back to the ordinary world with the elixir.
What is the elixir in Rommel's view? How do we
survive this? The elixir is a two -word concept,
volitional mastery. Volitional mastery. Okay,
explain that. That sounds like a Jedi term. It
basically means you have to choose. You cannot
be a passive victim of this tide. You have to
master the AI now. You have to use it, understand
it, integrate it into your workflow. But, and
this is the absolute crucial part, you have to
do it with a conscious intention of preserving
your humanity later. You learn to use the sword
so the sword doesn't end up using you. Perfectly
said. The elixir is the knowledge of how and
when to switch it off. It's about maintaining
your human -only reasoning capability while still
benefiting from the abundance. You use the prosthetic
to run faster, but you make damn sure you still
run on your own legs every single day so they
don't atrophy. And this is where we see Brian
Rolimo's role in all this. He isn't just reporting
on the weather. He's trying to build the arc
for us. He is the guide. He's the embodiment
of this journey. He differentiates himself from
every other AI pundit because they're looking
at stock prices, and he's looking at the human
nervous system. He understands that AI is an
extension of us, not just a product. He's weaving
this 5 ,000 -day - narrative to prepare you the
listener the call to adventure is for us yes
we are in the interregnum the old world is dead
the new world is not yet born those who resist
they'll be victims they will get washed away
by the de -skilling they'll suffer the grief
without ever reaching the reconstruction but
those who master it those who use this tetrad
as a map they forge the legends they become the
artisans they do so what does this all mean for
the listener right now today We aren't in 2039
yet. We are on that swaying rope bridge. What
do we do? It means you need to look at your tools
differently. Don't just ask, how can this make
me faster? Ask the Tetrad questions. What is
this tool retrieving? What is this tool obslessing
in me? Am I losing a skill that I actually want
to keep? And actively prepare for the reversal.
Exactly. Build your own personal friction. Write
a letter by hand once a week. Read a physical
book. Go for a walk without your phone. Keep
your unaugmented cognitive muscles strong because
when the reversal comes, when the gridlock hits
or the atmosphere becomes too thick, those muscles
will be the only thing that saves your sense
of self. That is such a powerful image. The Artisan
Awakening isn't about woodworking. It's about...
It's about being an artisan of the mind. That's
the mission. We've used McLuhan's tetrad to map
the trajectory of AI from a tool to an environment.
We've seen the clear danger of cognitive aphasia,
but we've also seen the opportunity. the chance
to become something new, something more than
just a worker bee. I want to leave our listeners
with one final provocative thought, a specific
image from that reversal. Imagine a future, maybe
10 or 12 years from now, where human -only thought
is a luxury good, where the ability to think
a complex problem through from start to finish
without asking an AI for help is the rarest and
most valuable skill on the planet. Are you building
that capacity in yourself now? Or are you letting
the machine slowly, comfortably atrophy your
mind? That is the central question of the 5 ,000
Days. If you want to follow this journey, and
you absolutely should because you're going to
need this guide, you need to go to readmultiplex
.com. Follow the 5 ,000 Days series. Brian Rommel
is the guide you need. He's the one seeing these
patterns. The age of abundance is coming, whether
we like it or not. But it's up to you to decide
if you'll be a victim of it or a master of it.
Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll see you
in the future. Stay human.