All Shower Thoughts I Had This Year

have you ever paused to think about how one of the most famous sentences of all time doesn't make grammatical sense? Well, because we all apparently heard it wrong and continue to say it wrong. According to the man himself, Neil Armstrong, what he did say that day when he stepped foot on the moon was, "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," which makes much more sense.

There can be a lot of things that sound strange at first, but as we've all come to find out, sometimes reality can be stranger than fiction. Like how the sounds of the T-Rex speaking in Jurassic Park are actually just tortoises having sex, and how the ego only sounds like this because of Hollywood magic, when in reality it sounds more like this. Here are true facts that sound completely made up. It's pretty common knowledge at this point that humans can live with just one kidney, but did you also know that you can live without a spleen, an appendix, a gallbladder, tonsils, six of your ribs, and one lung? In fact, many people do, and they lead pretty normal lives.

The only thing you can't do with just one lung is participate in strenuous exercises or run long distances. But with just one lung, you could run from the United States to Russia, since the shortest distance between the two countries is just 2.4 miles. How comforting! This distance is measured from Russia's Big Diomede Island to America's Little Diomede Island. Why is America's island smaller? We might never know.

But you know what is really big, thick, and long? A giraffe's neck. Considering how massive these things are, it's incredible to think that they have the same number of bones as a human neck. They're just way bigger. And it's not just them and us; all mammals have the same number of bones in their neck. When we were younger, we were taught that there are seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, and 52 weeks in a year. But the truth is that's wrong. Well, technically, it's correct, but it only works here on Earth.

On other planets, it's completely different. On Venus, for example, a day is longer than an entire year. It's probably helpful to mention that a day on a particular planet is defined as the time it takes that planet to spin around once on its axis, and a year is the time it takes for the planet to orbit around the star— in this case, the Sun.

Pluto, sadly, wasn't able to complete a full orbit around the Sun in the 76 years from when it was discovered in 1930 to when it was declassified as a planet in 2006. A small planet with a really long orbit. But you know what is really, really long? It's the name of a hill in New Zealand. You're welcome! Here's a true fact that sounds completely made up: as of December 2022, more than half the people who earned six figures in the U.S. reported living paycheck to paycheck.

We've all faced rejections and insults. Don't let them get to you; they're just lessons that we all had to learn one way or another. The founder of Lamborghini, for example, had to be rejected by Ferrari before he got the desire to create Lamborghini. Steve Jobs had to be kicked out of his own company before he could bring it back to life. Microsoft had to stop producing newer versions of Internet Explorer to realize that they shouldn't have ever made it in the first place. But you get the point. Time is an illusion, and if you don't study history, it can be quite jarring to learn that sometimes things aren't as timely as we think.

Did you know that we sent a man to the Moon before we put wheels on suitcases? Just imagine how stressful it must have been for Neil to carry all that luggage to win from space! The invention of the iPhone in 2007 is closer to the existence of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the Pyramids of Giza. Although Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire and isn't the first university to ever exist, India's Nalanda University was in operation for hundreds of years before Oxford.

We made lighters before we made matches. Sharks existed before grass; heck, sharks were in existence before the rings of Saturn. It really makes you appreciate the beauty of human civilization. We've only been here for a short time, but we've been able to achieve so much.

We're so special, aren't we? That's what I told Rebecca before she broke up with me. But now I know I was wrong because she wasn't special; she was bananas. I don't mean that as an insult because we're all bananas—at least 50% of each of us. Because humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas and with fruit flies, as it turns out. Our profound exclusivity is neither profound nor exclusive. For what is exclusive, however, is a randomly shuffled deck of cards.

It may seem rather mundane, but the sequence of a randomly shuffled deck of cards has never been seen before and will never be seen again. A standard deck of cards has 52 cards, which means there are 52 factorial different ways the cards can be arranged when shuffled randomly. That number, 52 factorial, is eight with 67 zeros after it. To put this in perspective, the universe has existed for over 13 billion years, but let's round it up to 15 billion.

Let's also assume there are around 2 trillion galaxies, each containing approximately 100 trillion star systems. Each star system had 10 planets, and each planet hosted 10 billion life forms. Every one of those life forms could shuffle a deck of cards every second since the beginning of time, and they still wouldn't produce a repeated sequence. That is simply insane!

Speaking of arrangements, some countries aren't arranged the way we think they ought to be. Finland and North Korea are separated by just one country. New York is closer to the Equator than it is to Rome. And Bangladesh went to war in warning its Pakistan, two countries that are separated by India, the seventh largest country in the world.

And get this: all three countries were once considered the same country! Talk about sibling rivalry. The logistics for that war must have caused several buttloads, which is a legitimate unit of measurement equal to 126 gallons. Remember when you were young and your mom told you not to swallow apple seeds or a tree would grow in your belly? Well, it turns out she was wrong. Trees can't grow in people, but she was right in telling you not to swallow apple seeds.

Eating apple seeds can lead to cyanide poisoning. Don't worry too much, though; you need the seeds from at least 150 apples for that. Speaking of apples, Steve Jobs chose the name of his company to get back at his former employer, Atari, because phone books—a book that had a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of the businesses in the area—were written in alphabetical order. Apple would come before Atari, so whenever people searched for a computer business in the phone book, they would find Steve's company first.

Suffice it to say that they no longer need that slight competitive advantage. Fresh, clean water can do wonders, but how fresh is the water we drink? Did you know the probability that at least one of the molecules of the water you drink today passed through a dinosaur is 100 percent? We somehow keep coming back to dinosaurs. Maybe it's a sign that Rebecca and I should try to work things out.

Because at the end of the day, mistakes happen—like the time Switzerland accidentally invaded another country in 2007. Around 171 of Switzerland's troops accidentally went into Liechtenstein. The Swiss government formally apologized, but the governor of Liechtenstein wasn't worried and excused the situation. "It's happened before," he said. "Liechtenstein is really nice." As you can see, so nice, in fact, that in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Liechtenstein sent a company of 80 soldiers to war, only to have 81 return! Not only did they not have any casualties, but an Austrian liaison officer joined them on the way home.

But it also helps to have luck. Luck like Anatoli Bragowski had. He was a researcher working at the Soviet Union's most powerful particle accelerator, the U-70 synchrotron. He was down there one day to fix something. He leaned down to look at a part of the machine without realizing the accelerator was active at the time and stuck his head directly into the beam bath.

He reported seeing a tremendously bright flash, likely due to his optic nerves being excited through the roof. Believe it or not, he actually wanted to cover it up and decided to continue working. As time passed, Anatoli noticed huge swelling developing along the regions where the beam had entered and exited his head. He slowly started developing radiation sickness. There was no hiding anymore, so he sought help.

The physician in charge feared the worst, but as it turned out, Anatoli had unintentionally received a version of proton beam therapy often used to treat cancer. Thanks to the physics of the proton beam therapy, most of the energy that might have otherwise killed Anatoli was deposited outside of his skull. Despite suffering seizures and epilepsy, Anatoli lives on to this day. However, he refused an offer from the United States to be a research subject.

Oh, and half of his face stopped aging! Talk about expensive Botox! It's something Rebecca would have needed. I mean, I like... oh well, she’s gone. No, but I mean, for all her flaws, she was always very kind to me. Despite what we went through, despite how rough the breakup was, she put her hand in mine, looked me in the eye assuredly, and told me, "We can still be cousins." That, of course, was completely made up—or was it?

How many sides does a piece of paper have? I'll give you a second. Two? No, it's actually six! You don't realize it until you start stacking it. There's a lot of things in life that take us by surprise, a lot of things that aren't really as they seem. Like elephants being herbivores—they'd be a lot scarier if they were carnivores. Your parents told you not to talk to strangers, yet here we are. When you're talking or conversing with someone online, a lot of times you don't really know that much about them.

The nice thing about not knowing anyone's age on the Internet is that you can pretty much get in an argument with an eight-year-old and leave feeling superior. That serotonin boost can be exactly what you need some days. A lot of us could use a boost of those happy chemicals to make our lives a lot easier. When you experience depression, your brain refuses to produce, let's call it a happy hormone, as a reward for your brain cells doing what they're supposed to do.

And as a result, your cells go on strike, refusing to work for no pay, and the whole system comes crashing down, benefiting absolutely nobody involved. Sounds strikingly familiar. History repeats! Speaking of history, it must have been really awkward being the first historian to have ever existed. Just imagine that conversation happening. It's like, "So, what are you doing?" "Just writing down everything that's been happening." "Why?"

But the way we view history is now changing. At some point, the internet will be older than all humans alive, and future generations will have tons of high-quality video footage of so many extinct animals, old civilizations, and where Santa used to live before the Arctic melted and disappeared. That might make you feel like an old doomer, but remember, the number of people older than you never increases; it only decreases.

It's like a lifelong race to be ranked number one, except the prize for winning is just death. And out of the billions of people who have ever lived, just one of them suffered the most agonizing death of us all so far. But maybe that happened hundreds of years ago. Until trains were invented in 1804, every human who ever lived that experienced the speed upwards of 56 miles per hour was falling to their death.

Normally, the floor is what stops gravity from killing us, but if we get too far away from it, gravity uses the floor to kill us. Life is short, so they say! But life is only short if you love your life; otherwise, it is very, very painfully long. It's like playing a game. In this case, it'd be more painful to lose the game by one point than by a hundred points, you know what I mean?

But enough with being morbid. Good dreams are basically a free trial of a life you could have been living. But in a way, if there are an infinite number of universes, then our dreams aren't actually dreams; they're clips and previews from another universe that we can see into. But our universe isn't so bad! Being able to go to sleep without worrying that you'll get eaten by some random animal is probably the most privileged thing about our modern world. It wasn't always like that, so we should really appreciate it.

We don't really appreciate a lot of free things in life, like taking your health for granted all the time until you're sick. Only then do you actually care. Oh, and email! We take our own planet for granted almost daily. National parks are a perpetual reminder of what the world would look like if it weren't for humans. Ironic how we enjoy them so much, isn't it?

I just blinked and most of the time we barely even notice how often we blink. Characters in first-person video games never blink, if you think about it. It doesn't feel like much—it's just one of those manual processes that our bodies do for us that we just forget about. We really take for granted how smooth the insides of our eyelids are. Imagine if they were like sandpaper!

Us humans can barely live with one another without trying to kill each other, so the fact that people can convince themselves that meeting aliens would go smoothly is nothing short of pure hopium. If they got upset with us, then just throw another one of those big rocks at Earth, and we'd be toast.

Speaking of big rocks, the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs' reign on Earth had technically the highest ratio of killing birds to one stone in Earth's history. From all the life on land to all the life in Earth's oceans, 99% of everything was wiped out in an instant. We are part of that remaining one percent. I like that quote so much I put it on a hoodie. You can get it here.

Still, the deep ocean is terrifying. People will swim in the ocean at the beaches, even though there are definitely many corpses in it. People will not swim in a pool with a corpse in it, though, so therefore, as weird as it sounds, humans all have a corpse-to-water ratio that is acceptable for them to swim in. See why people don't like oceans now, huh?

Water makes fabric a darker shade, even though water is clear. I guess I probably should have taken my clothes off before I got in the shower. Anyway, after rush hour, I normally brush my teeth, and I'm super grateful to be able to do that. Most animals have never seen their own teeth, let alone be able to clean them.

As much as you'd like to believe it, wisdom teeth aren't useless; they're actually the reason some oral surgeons are able to make a living. It's quite the career! It's weird we choose our careers when we're worse informed about what they're actually like. Some people will work the same job for their entire life, wondering what life could have been like if they had taken a slightly different path.

Who knows? You could have ended up like Jeff Bezos and had more money than brain cells—literally! 200 billion is a massive number. There's a certain point in everyone's life where how high can you count changes from a matter of knowledge to a matter of will. And I wouldn't attempt this one: counting to 200 billion will take you over 6,000 years.

Our brains just aren't capable of even comprehending things that large. It's strong, but not the strongest. Yes, the brain did indeed name itself, but it also recognized that it named itself and was surprised when it realized that. So are we actually as smart as we think we are? We can't see into the future.

Unfortunately, we aren't psychic. But always remember: psychics that don't accept walk-in appointments aren't real psychics; they'd be expecting them, right? But although we can't see the future, we do remember the important events that happened in our lives in the past. Some stranger somewhere still remembers you because you were kind to them when no one else was. You've made an impact in their life. You made them feel something no one else could.

However, almost universally, you can instantaneously stress out any person just by shouting, "Hey, catch!" That was uncalled for, and I'm sorry for that. Getting hit in the face by a ball at that speed would most definitely have you in the hospital. The hospital is simultaneously the building where most people leave without entering and also the building where most people enter without leaving.

We're born against our will. We also die against our will. But regardless, we're here. We're alive! Kids don't really enjoy sleeping. It's always seemed like a hassle to get them to finally go down. It's probably because they haven't gotten bored of life yet. They're young and may be here against their will, but there's still so much to see, so much to do.

Kids are all different, but they all have one thing in common: they're brutally honest. The easiest way to tell if you're obese is to ask a kid to draw you. If they draw your stick figure with a line for the body, you're probably fine. However, if they draw you with a circle, I've got some bad news for you.

You can be underweight, or you can be overweight, but you can't be white. We all change as we age. We grow, and we mature. This can be seen in many ways. There was a moment when your mom or dad picked you up as a baby and put you down, only to never pick you up again. You got big. You grew up.

If you're still decently young, the odds are that you still haven't met the majority of people who you'll befriend in life, and those are the same people who will inevitably be at your funeral when the lights go out one last time. As sad as it sounds, most guys will receive their first bunch of flowers at their funeral. Go buy your friend a flower—I'm sure he'll appreciate it.

If you happen to be older, however, and you go to college at an old enough age, the odds of you taking a history class about simply life events you experienced is actually quite high. If you happen to be in English class, however, I wish you the best of luck. I understand how English can be difficult to learn.

I've always said this, though: only one letter apart, creation and cremation are two very opposite things. And somehow, the old you is actually your younger self. It can sometimes seem like it's completely backwards. It reminds me of passwords. Passwords have probably stopped more people from getting into their own accounts than hackers, having the opposite effect that it was intended to have. Protecting your belongings is important, even if you're protecting yourself from you.

Apparently, funny enough, there are locks in a police locker room to prevent theft. These are the people we call when our houses get broken into, and yet they can't even stop themselves from stealing from each other! If a cop gets caught stealing, does he by law have to arrest himself? Hopefully, they'd be on house arrest.

Because people who were sentenced to house arrest in 2020 really lucked out timing-wise, because we all were too! Luck would have been on your side. And for most, luck is hard to come by. Gambling is only considered an addiction if you're bad at it; otherwise, you're considered a lucky degenerate. At least you're rich, though!

But if someone tells you you look like a million bucks, don't get an ego; it's less and less of a compliment every year because of inflation. Regardless, plenty of people have struck it rich based purely off of coincidence and luck. Sometimes it doesn't take that much. A lot of Google's revenue comes from people that are just too lazy to type "dot com" after the end of their search.

Coincidences can either make us look really, really good or really, really bad. For example, a guy walking around with one crowbar is a lot more suspicious than a guy walking around with three crowbars. School zones have a very specific speed that you need to be driving at. Drive too slow and you're really creepy, but drive too fast and you start wondering why the speed bumps are screaming. Okay, sorry, that was a pretty distasteful joke.

It's a guilty pleasure. We all have guilty pleasures, but to be honest, every pleasure is a guilty pleasure. If you're anxious enough, anxiety sucks! We've all experienced it at some point or another, and it can really get in the way of so many things in life—your work, your free time, even your relationships.

It doesn't matter how many fish there are in the sea if you don't know how to fish. You know, the night before you have a day off is like a hundred times better than the actual day off itself because you're already worrying about the next day when you have to go back. Anxiety gets in the way of everything. But no matter how anxious or lonely you get, just know that somewhere out there, there's a lonely piece of paper that's been in the same printer tray for years and years on end, simply because new paper is always loaded on top of it before the rest runs out.

Everyone and everything has a purpose, except that piece of paper. Let it get you down. You've survived every battle you've gone through. You're undefeated! In the end, though, we're all losers in the race of time. Time is limited, so make the most of it! Me personally? I'll be seeing if I can make a slinky goat on an escalator forever. It might be a waste of time. Actually, it is a waste of time, but I'll be happy, and that's all that matters!

I think. What if your entire life is flashing in front of your eyes, but you're already dead? If you're not dead but alive, everything is trying to kill you constantly! Your stomach is constantly trying to kill you. Treating it makes it stop. You need to drink as well. Being hydrated is a necessity. Drink your water!

Normally you empty your drink from the top, but when you use a straw, you empty it from the bottom. Your lungs are also constantly trying to kill you. Breathing resets that timer, too. We really take for granted the fact that most of our body's processes are automated. Aging is a disease with a 100% mortality rate.

Maybe that's why aliens aren't visiting us. Maybe they should visit Antarctica, though, because Antarctica is statistically the best place to have a baby—because all 11 babies born there lived, making it have a zero-percent infant mortality rate! It's pretty cool to think about that there are only 365 different birthdays for nearly 8 billion people. You live to be around 80, and you spend a third of your life sleeping.

But when you sleep, you're just looking at the back of your eyelids for eight hours straight. And to be honest, sleep is just a free trial of death. So we're all dead. Here's some more shower thoughts: [Music] A lot of TV shows have those fake laugh tracks in the background so you know when to laugh at the really bad jokes. But what you don't really think about is for the really, really old shows—while you're sitting and watching and listening to it, you're also at the same time probably listening to a bunch of dead people laughing.

Related: one day they're going to be more dead people on social media than there are living people. If they still exist, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube even will be a graveyard of content and information from people who lived hundreds of years ago. It will become the biggest source of information for any event. You'll be able to see how people reacted to presidential elections, to the death of their idols, to the spread of new diseases—to everything there is! You won't be able to see how the world reacted to sliced bread, though.

Bread is just a loaf of dough, so by that logic, cheese is just a loaf of milk, and an ice cube is just a loaf of water. Speaking of ice, something I find kind of interesting is that there have been entire civilizations who never knew that water had a solid form.

The money you earn is never actually yours; it's just your turn with it. Everyone works to survive, and all of the money that you've earned actually belongs to someone else. There's a lot of jobs and businesses that bank off the fact that things in your life can go wrong. Doctors only make money because you get sick. Mechanics make money because your car breaks down. Lawyers make money because you messed up really, really bad—like maybe you robbed a bank!

But if you do try to rob a bank, you shouldn't have any problems with rent or food bills for the next 10 years, regardless of whether or not you're successful. A jail and a prison are basically the same thing, but a jailer and prisoner are completely different. The company Bic is known for making lighters and pens. Both of these happen to be things that are frequently stolen, which is kind of a pretty good business model, if you think about it.

Teachers make money off the fact that you don't know how to add numbers together or speak a language properly. And speaking of language, you ever just take time to think about letters and words? They're weird and confusing, but kind of cool! It takes more letters to spell the word "short" than it does to spell "long." Also, all the e's in the word "Mercedes" are pronounced differently! When you say the word "forward," your lips move forward. When you say the word "back," your lips move back.

When hurricanes form, the most dangerous part is the eye. It destroys everything in its path! It's right in the middle, which also happens to be where the letter "I" is in the middle of the word "hurricane." It's kind of cool! Hurricanes are deadly.

Everyone tends to talk about and consider the question that is: where do we go when we die? And it's a pretty good question, but no one ever asks where we were before we were born. The world hasn't changed much over the past 700 years. Today, we take pictures of food and put it on Instagram, and a lot of people get super frustrated by this, but during the Renaissance, people would sit around for weeks on end painting a table full of food.

You know, you've probably walked past someone that you've played video games with online before and just didn't realize. Similarly, you see people every single day that you will never see again in your entire life. Out of every event that has happened, everything led you both to the same place at the same time, only to veer off path and never meet again.

On a similar note, you've probably seen someone on the last day of their life, and you could have never known. To make this more fun, though, your future wife is probably telling her boyfriend that they'll be together forever. How cute! You often hear that life is a roller coaster, and I get it, it feels like it. But when you're on a roller coaster, aren't the downhill parts the most fun?

You also often hear things that are so easy, a caveman could do it. The problem is that cavemen were able to start fires without lighters or matches— and were able to kill animals that were three to four times their size. So is it really that easy? If you've been using technology like computers or cell phones for years, as most of us have, you probably scrolled for hundreds or thousands of miles.

But honestly, you scrolling doesn't mean you've actually moved anything. When you scroll on your phone, nothing changes except for the color of the pixels on the screen. Nothing is moving; it just seems like it. When your laptop overheats, it freezes. No British king would have this issue, though, because no ruling British king has ever used the internet. Before the invention of phones, the question "where are you?" was probably never asked.

Eventually, when you're ordering something or sending a letter or something, you may have to put "Earth" as a part of your address. Maybe when you can live on the moon, you've seen more of the surface of the moon with your own eyes than you will ever likely see of Earth! Actually, if you think about it, about half of the universe is in your field of view at all times. But for now, humans are on Earth, but we're weird and a little broken.

Brushing your teeth is really the only time you ever clean your skeleton. Cleaning is just rearranging dirt. Speaking of cleaning, you should probably really clean your glasses right now; they're disgusting. You really can't clean something without making something else dirty. You also can't move your top teeth. Go ahead and try!

You can't hum while holding your nose shut either. Go ahead and try this one too! And while you're at it, you also can't snap your fingers inside your mouth. You ever realize that humans cut down birdhouses to make birdhouses? If you've ever clapped your hands before, you never actually stopped; there's just a really, really, really long pause between claps.

We do have some redeeming qualities, I guess. We live a lot longer than most animals! If you're over the age of 30, you are alive before every single dog that is currently on Earth. We argue a lot, though, over really, really stupid issues, like whether or not we should eat other animals, even though we are animals ourselves. But if vegetarians don't like each other, is it still considered beef?

Let's flip a coin and decide! Flipping a coin isn't really a 50/50 thing, though. It's random! In a vacuum, a robot can flip a coin millions of times and get heads every single time. Humans only really use it to make decisions less stressful, even though it's a purely random event.

Machine learning is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives every day, but you observe machine learning all the time; your brain! Your brain is really, really good at learning things. This is shown in your dreams. Your brain can recreate scenarios with people you've known for years and just have full-on conversations with them that your brain made up on the spot—even with people you just met. And it can all feel so real!

But no one has ever dreamed about popcorn until it happened. And honestly, the person who discovered popcorn had to be super confused when it happened. You ever think about how arms on chairs are just like chairs for your arms? Also, if two mind readers are reading each other's minds, whose mind are they actually reading?

It's weird! But what's also weird is that blue is usually seen as cold, while red is usually seen as hot. But blue fire is hotter than red fire! It's likely that another kid is going to grow up in your childhood home and have a lot of the same experiences that you did while growing up there.

You'll use every room, toilet, staircase, and light switch that you did. But why are they called light switches? At the same time, they're also dark switches. Almost everything you have ever owned is still on Earth somewhere, unless you're Elon Musk and send your car into space.

All of the materials needed to create today's technology have existed since the beginning of the Earth; it just wasn't in the right form or put together yet. You're living in an age where you can be smarter than almost anyone in the past 2 million years! You can be smarter than almost all 100 billion people who have ever lived! You have the world's information at your fingertips.

Well, you'd rather sit here and listen to me tell you what I think about in the shower. I'm flattered, really, but please get out of my house before I call the cops! As light travels through space, it behaves like a wave, but light is also made of tiny particles called photons. This is the paradox of wave particles, and it has completely revolutionized modern physics.

The universe is filled with intriguing paradoxes like this—statements that challenge our understanding of reality and force us to question our deepest assumptions. These paradoxes have the power to change our lives in profound ways, opening us up to new possibilities and reshaping the very fabric of our existence. Here are paradoxes that will change your life.

Well, the lotto jackpot has grown to over 64 million dollars. It all started with a lottery ticket! [Music] If you go out and buy a lottery ticket knowing fully well that your chances of winning are 10 million to one, it'd be logical to assume you didn't win. You'd also be justified in thinking that your friend, your uncle, his sister, their cousin, and their dog all have losing tickets.

You're justified in believing that everyone who bought a ticket will lose, even when you know the lottery was fair and there has to be a winner. You're justified in believing something you know to be false. This demonstrates that truth is relative. It depends on context, prejudice, and your perspective about the world.

Because the truth is, the only thing you can prove with certainty is that nothing is certain. This is why people don't consider Pinocchio saying, "My nose will grow now," to be a paradox. His nose will not grow because he didn't lie; he simply made a false prediction. If we have a set of all sets that do not contain themselves, does that set contain itself?

Imagine there's a barber who shaves all men who don't shave themselves, and only men who don't shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself? This is an example of Russell's Paradox—a paradox that shook the mathematical world. These paradoxes playfully nudge us into realizing that self-reference can often lead to unexpected contradictions.

Contradictions aside, though, we all want to be happy. But those who seek out happiness directly often don't find it. This is the Paradox of Hedonism. If we truly want to be happy, we need to stop searching for happiness and pursue other meaningful activities, like nurturing our relationships or serving others. Only then can we be truly happy.

The pursuit of pleasure in its raw form often leads to disappointment, while a life lived in service can lead to unexpected happiness. Deep down, we all know this. Endless partying, decadent eating habits, and shopping sprees—we know these activities are never as fulfilling as we think they are. More often than not, we're left with a sense of emptiness after the dust settles. It's called post-indulgence clarity.

We see this paradox even in our relationships. Expecting your partner to completely control your happiness often makes them unable to make you happy—at least not in the way you want it. The reality is that to have good relationships, we need to be somewhat independent of them.

People think that to find the right partner, they need all the options in the world to pick the perfect person. But in truth, having more options isn't always better. Just look at the fact we have all these dating apps at our fingertips, and many of us still can't find a healthy relationship. This is the Paradox of Choice, and contrary to what we think, many options often leave us less satisfied with our final decision.

I once watched a TikTok where this guy said men today see more beautiful women while scrolling through TikTok for five minutes than kings from the past did in their entire lives. And although it was a joke, he was entirely correct! But it's not a good thing. According to biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the human brain isn't built to deal with more than five to nine options for a partner. After that, the brain goes into decision paralysis, where it almost refuses to pick.

So the next time you feel inundated by options, remember that less is sometimes better, and more data may not always be more informative. Learning is great! Asking questions and figuring out how things work is how our species has gotten to where it is today. But learning is also a paradox because the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. It's an amazing paradox—one that encourages you to never stop learning.

Paradoxes are everywhere—in mathematics and statistics, like Simpson's Paradox. Here, trends that appear in a different group will disappear or even reverse when the groups are combined to form a larger group. In the 1970s, UC Berkeley was accused of gender bias against women in its admissions process. At first glance, the admissions data made it seem like men were more likely to be admitted than women.

But when the data was broken down into individual departments, most departments had admission percentages that were significantly in favor of women. The problem was that a higher proportion of women were applying to more competitive departments with lower admission rates. So when compared to all the men in the school, it seemed like women had lower rates of admission. But when compared to the men in each department, it was clear that the women actually had a higher rate!

This is unfortunately how misinformation spreads—it's usually not with wrong data, but with the correct data expressed without proper context. Because the reality is that oftentimes, as paradoxical as it may seem, the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Changes are ever present in our lives. The human body replaces billions of cells daily, and every seven years or so, you are an entirely different cellular collection.

So if we're constantly changing, how do we know the person we are today is the same person we were seven years ago? One might say the essence of who we are remains, but that essence is really just the result of our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences, which are also changing. So who really are you? Maybe you like defining yourself based on your struggles—how hard you pursue something you want to achieve.

But have you ever thought that sometimes trying too hard to get something almost makes it impossible to get? It's the backwards law, and it's an interesting concept with lots of layers to uncover. If you're interested in a dedicated video about the subject, just let me know in the comments below.

In 2016, after his infamous penalty miss against Chile, Lionel Messi hung up his boots with his beloved Argentina in what seemed like the last nail in the coffin. Messi simply had enough! On the club stage, success seemed to come to him so easily, but where he really wanted it—where he desperately tried to do it all by himself—victory seemed elusive.

Consider the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise coined by Zeno, the father of stoicism, and this paradox: Achilles gave a tortoise a head start and races it to infinity. Zeno argued that Achilles will never truly overtake the tortoise because when he reaches where the tortoise started, the tortoise will have moved a little further. And this pattern will continue until infinity.

The paradox is silly, but it challenges our perception of movement, space, and infinity. And the realization it leaves with us—especially with Messi's story—is that sometimes, no matter how much you try, some things seem just that little bit out of reach. Messi had to accept that part of his legacy was beyond his control. The Argentine Football Federation was underfinanced and poorly managed, and there was no one around him when he needed support, with criticism pouring down from all sides and embarrassing defeats one after another.

The dream would remain just that—a dream. Yet, as soon as he let go, the tide began turning. Messi took almost a metaphorical back seat, dropping deeper than his traditional role, playing farther from the goal than he had ever played. His job now wasn't to shine himself but cast light on others—many of whom were young kids who were fans of him when he hung up his boots in 2016.

But there he was on December 18, 2022, nearly six years after that missed penalty—lifting the World Cup! Very few stories are as remarkable as Messi's. Most of us live and die without doing or being anything special—or is that so? If there's nothing oddly special about us, the Earth and the life it holds, then the universe should be teeming with life—and yet, it isn't!

You might say maybe that it is and we just aren't advanced enough to search the galaxy to find it. And you'll be right! But considering how young our galaxy is compared to others out there, and that if given enough time any advanced species should be able to figure out interstellar travel, if there are any aliens, we should have seen them by now! This is Fermi's paradox, and put simply by a New York Times article, it exclaims, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."

Maybe equally paradoxical is the insignificance of the question: are we special? When you boil it down to the individual, there's around 20 quintillion animals on Earth—that's 20 billion billion! Yet, the value of a single life isn't questioned. So why do we think that the universe teeming with life will make us any less unique? There's something innately valuable about life! What exactly it is, remains forever elusive.

And speaking of elusive things in life, the coastline paradox is a geographical conundrum that originated in the mind of British scientist Louis Fry Richardson. It's a concept that challenges our understanding of measurement and infinity, revealing a surprising contradiction that's not only mathematical but also physical.

Essentially, this paradox states that the length of a coastline depends on the length of the tool used to measure it. The shorter the ruler, the longer the measured length of the coastline. This is because a smaller ruler can capture more of the intricate twists and turns of the coastline. But here the paradox arises: theoretically, as the ruler gets infinitely small, the length of the coastline becomes infinitely large.

Consider the coastline of Britain as an example. If we were to measure it with a 100-kilometer ruler, we would get a significantly shorter length than with a one-kilometer ruler, which would capture more details of the coastline. And if we used a one-centimeter ruler, the coastline would appear even longer! Following this logic, to its extreme, the coastline seems to stretch to infinity as the ruler shrinks to zero.

But how can this be? After all, Britain is an island of finite size! The paradox stems from the fractal nature of coastlines; they have a high degree of complexity and self-similarity at all scales. This is a real-world example of a mathematical concept known as fractal geometry.

The coastline paradox is not only mind-bending but also has practical implications for cartography, geology, and various other disciplines. It teaches us a humbling lesson about the limitations of our measurements and how they can be influenced by the skill at which we look at things. It's a testament to the unexpected complexities that can emerge from something as simple as measuring a length.

The coastline paradox is a stunning illustration of how reality can defy your intuitive assumptions, revealing an infinitely intricate, endlessly fascinating world of surprises. It's a poetic ode to the idea of paradoxes themselves. From being incorporated into movies to revolutionizing reality and the sciences, paradoxes have captured our imagination—intellectual enigmas, that's what they are! Beautiful puzzles that tease our intellect to challenge our perceptions and invite us to look beyond the apparent.

They hold up a mirror to the complexities of life in the universe, reflecting an intriguing and elusive existence. Paradoxes gracefully illustrate that our universe isn't a mere collection of absolutes, but a symphony of mysteries, wonders, and unfathomable truths. The universe is a mind-boggling place!

Actually, I'm not even sure I can call it a place! NASA says the universe is everything, but what they really mean is that it contains everything: all of space, energy, time, and matter—like you and me! But there's more to it than meets the eye, literally. All ordinary matter—like the particles that form us and everything else we can see—only comprise about 5% of the universe.

So far, that's all the stuff that makes up our stars, planets, and galaxies, and we've only been able to see about half of all of that with our telescopes! The rest is entirely invisible. It's as if the universe doesn't like being put under our microscope—or telescope, to be more precise. Around 27% of our universe is dark matter, which emits no light or energy and can't be detected by conventional sensors and detectors!

We don't even know what it's really made of! And to be completely honest, we're not even sure it exists—we could only assume! To be fair, we have strong reason to believe dark matter exists. As early as the 1920s, astronomers hypothesized that the universe must contain more matter than we can see because the universe's gravitational forces appear stronger than the visible matter can account for.

It's a simple matter of math! Okay, probably not simple math, but you get the idea. As if this wasn't confusing enough, the remaining 68% of the universe is made up of dark energy. Just like dark matter, dark energy is purely theoretical. It popped on our radars in 1998 when the Hubble telescope discovered that in the past, the universe expanded at a slower rate than it does today.

And if the universe is now growing at an accelerating rate, then there must be a force countering gravity and causing this acceleration! Wait, did I just describe repulsive gravity? As you could see, or can't, actually, there's a lot of speculation when it comes to developing a blueprint for understanding the universe and everything in it!

Even if we focus solely on the visible 5%, there's still a lot to unpack! The universe is a very confusing place, but subjects like math and physics make it easy for us to understand and appreciate the beauty in its chaos. Next time you find yourself gazing at a sky full of stars, take a moment and try to count how many you can see.

Let me help you: on a clear night, there are about six thousand! But if we wanted to calculate the number of stars in the entire universe, first we'd have to count the galaxies. And to do that, astronomers take very detailed pictures of small parts of the sky and count the galaxies in those pictures. They then multiply that number by the images needed to photograph the entire sky.

Are you ready for the answer? There's approximately 2 trillion galaxies in the universe! 2 trillion clusters of dust swirling in a mostly invisible universe, hovering countless stars, planets, and even civilizations! Our Milky Way galaxy alone is home to 100 billion stars.

Using this number as a standard, we can predict that there are roughly 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. A staggering number, I know! It's about ten times the number of cups of water in Earth's oceans. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, every star has at least one planet orbiting it, meaning there are at least 100 billion exoplanets in our galaxy alone. Today, NASA has discovered more than 5,000 of them.

The big question that has been haunting us ever since we developed the mental capacity to ponder our existence in this vast universe is still unanswered: are we alone in the universe? Well, according to Enrico Fermi, a Nobel prize-winning physicist, considering the young age of our solar system compared to the much older age of the universe, interstellar travel should be easy to achieve given enough time. Earth should have been visited by intelligent aliens by now if they did exist!

This interpretation became known as the Fermi Paradox, and it provides no consolation to our lonely existence. But what if life isn't as unique as we think it is? What if the universe is teeming with countless species far more intelligent than we are? Species that know of our existence and even visit us, only today, must find us too primitive for interaction.

Think about an ant colony that you happen to come across during your walk in the park. Would you try to communicate with them? It would be pointless, wouldn't it? If you're having a bad day, you might even go out of your way to step on them! Maybe our entire existence is equivalent to an ant colony placed in this region of the universe by some sort of higher intelligence—an isolated experiment with no particular purpose.

Alright, I'll admit that's a bit dark! Let's bring some light back into the equation. Light is the fastest thing in the universe, and in a vacuum, it can travel at speeds close to 300,000 kilometers per second! To put that in perspective, light can circulate the Earth seven and a half times in just one second!

Even at these insane speeds, it would take light 92 billion years to travel across the observable universe! Yes, that's where the measurement "light year" comes from. Light is strange! It's an electromagnetic wave of massless particles called photons that travel outwards in straight lines.

But how can it travel around the Earth if it moves in straight lines? Maybe Earth is flat after all. I won't get into that right now, but I made an entire video about it—you should check it out. Spoiler though: it isn't! While light does travel in straight lines, it can also be bent by gravity.

Contrary to what we were taught in school, gravity isn't a force—it doesn't pull anything downward. Instead, it just curves the fabric of the universe. If you're confused, don't feel bad. Gravity has confounded the best of us! Winston Churchill famously said that gravity is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But we've put our best scientists on it.

And while Newton gave us a good understanding of gravity, it was Einstein who cracked the code. To do so, Einstein first had to reimagine three-dimensional space by adding time to the equation. The outcome is a four-dimensional construct called space-time, and a mass like the sun warps this fabric by creating a valley.

And then, planets like Earth circle around the valley like a ball around a roulette wheel. This is what we call the force of gravity. Einstein had quite the imagination! Before he was recognized as a genius, he worked as a patent clerk and had a lot of time to think about, well, time!

In his special relativity theory, Einstein proved that time is relative to the observer! Meaning that when an object is moving really fast, it experiences time more slowly. For example, in 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly spent nearly a year on board the International Space Station, which meant that he was moving much faster than his twin brother Mark, who was on Earth's surface.

Based on Einstein's special relativity theory, Mark aged five milliseconds more than his brother did in space during this time. This is called time dilation, and while five milliseconds doesn't seem like much, at speeds approaching that of light, time dilation can have much more dramatic effects.

If a 15-year-old leaves Earth traveling at 99.5% the speed of light for five years, upon returning to Earth they will find that they've aged only five years while everyone else has aged 50! Mind-blowing, I know! But time dilation isn't exclusive to speed. Gravity can also slow time.

The bigger the mass of an object, the bigger the warping of space-time, and the slower time moves! It's believed that time freezes entirely at the edge of black holes, at the event horizon. Who knows? Maybe time even moves backward inside black holes!

Speaking of black holes, in the 1990s, the Hubble telescope discovered that black holes aren't as rare as we thought they were. Almost every galaxy we know of, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center. We still don't know what they're doing there, but they must have played a significant part since they're at the heart of every galaxy!

Maybe galaxies gave birth to black holes, or black holes to galaxies! You know, your typical chicken and egg situation, but on a cosmic scale! Observations from the Hubble tell us that galaxies were born around one billion years after the Big Bang.

We know that the Big Bang was created out of a singularity—an infinitely small, hot, and dense point—which is the exact definition of black holes. Could our universe have been born out of a black hole? It very well could have!

You ever wondered what was there before the Big Bang? Was there a time before time itself? As creatures of time, it's hard imagining a time without time! Okay, this time I'm done talking about time. I'll leave this topic for another video!

Here's one to make you gasp for breath. Every atom of oxygen in your lungs, carbon in your muscles, calcium in your bones, and iron in your blood was created inside a star before Earth was born. Apart from hydrogen, every other ingredient in our body is made from elements forged by stars. Stars are basically giant element furnaces. Their intense heat can cause atoms to collide, creating new elements like iron and carbon.

Now aren't you glad there are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe? If you're feeling overwhelmed by the true immensity of it all, you can take a step back and focus your energy inward. There are around seven octillion atoms in a 70-kilogram or 150-pound body—that's seven billion billion billion! And these atoms are made up of even smaller fundamental particles like electrons.

The study of matter and energy at the smallest fundamental level is called quantum physics. And believe it or not, we still don't know much about it! An electron, for example, can exist in two places at one time. It's called superposition! If we're made of electrons and other quantum particles, why can't we be in two places at once? Is there something I'm missing here?

As I said, quantum physics is a mind-boggling field! But unlike dark matter and dark energy, at least we can observe quantum particles, right? Well, we can, but it's a bit more complicated than you might think. One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory is that the sheer act of observation can alter the observed reality.

One of the most famous experiments in physics, the double-slit experiment, demonstrated that particles like electrons could have wave-like properties and suggested that simply observing the electron can dramatically affect its behavior! Like most of the universe, it seems that electrons don't like being observed. They've been proven to be rather intimate with each other!

Maybe that's why once interacting, subatomic particles can form unbreakable bonds, even if they're billions of light-years apart! It's called quantum entanglement and is still one of the many mysteries of quantum physics! Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance," which sounds like an incredible name for a band, I'll admit!

Maybe diving into the world of subatomic wasn't such a good idea, but it was necessary. Finding a link between the very small and the large will be the key to understanding everything the universe offers. And despite everything we know, we haven't even begun to scratch the surface!

At the end of the day, our existence in this cold and silent universe is as confusing as it is mesmerizing. But there's a certain kind of wisdom in not knowing. Maybe if we did, we'd have no reason to push the boundaries of our knowledge anymore, or worse, we'd have no reason to look up at the stars and just wonder!

On a clear night, your pets of sky can be lit by as many as 6,000 stars! So whenever you can, look above and enjoy the cosmic view. You never know what you might discover!

I promise it hasn't been eight months since I last had a shower! This year has just flown by so quickly that I didn't get time to gather my thoughts—my shower thoughts! Dreams are confusing. Some people believe that they can tell the future. Others feel that they're just a way for our brains to remember our past.

Whatever you think about them, dreams shouldn't be that confusing, right? I mean, after all, our brains are the ones creating them! So why are they also simultaneously being surprised, entertained, confused, and scared by them? It's like one half of your brain is creating a short film for the other half to watch.

There's a lot we don't understand about dreams, like every time we die in a dream, we immediately wake up! Is it because our brains have never seen what happens after we die, and so we don't know what to create? What if that's the case? How come our smartphones almost never appear in our dreams either, even though we spend almost all our waking hours looking at them?

What's even weirder is to think about how many times you've been in other people's dreams that they've never told you about. Anyway, enough about dreaming! The past two years have flown by, and things have evolved faster than we ever could have imagined!

I recently met up with a friend I had issues with in the past and discovered they had completely changed. They had outgrown their former self in the best way possible. I was happy for them, but I couldn't help but think that there must be people from their past who dislike a version of them that probably doesn't exist anymore.

Along with outgrowing our former selves, we're also outgrowing the world we live in and the technology we use. There's a high chance that most of us will never need to use a physical copy of the dictionary again and that our great-grandchildren will have to be told what gas stations were!

I wonder what those kids are going to be like and whether the ones who don't know much about history will think of the 1990s kids as basically being the same as the 1890s kids. If you think that's unlikely right now, most of us talk about the ancient Romans as if they're all basically the same, without realizing that the civilization spanned nearly a thousand years.

Speaking of history, though, isn't it kind of funny how, whenever people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about how doing one little thing differently could drastically change their present reality? But no one thinks about how the principle is still the exact same in the present even without the existence of time travel!

If you were going to just get up tomorrow, move out of the country, and never come back, you would be deleting a lifetime's worth of interactions and experiences and replacing them with different ones. You would be creating a new timeline of your life! Unfortunately, no matter what time or place you live, if the theory is true that we only have one soulmate, then the odds of us actually finding them are stacked heavily against us.

The good news is that the odds also say that there's at least one person out there describing your exact features and personality as what they want in their ideal partner. So keep looking! As they say, there's plenty of fish in the sea. Before you commit to someone, just be warned: every relationship either lasts forever or too long.

Wait, what was I talking about before that? Oh yeah, fish! Everyone values a human life over the life of a fish, but very few people value a single human life over the life of every fish! Meaning everyone has a certain number of fish that they would prefer to be alive over Bob from work. Same thing is especially true for spiders!

I mean, spiders police the entire insect population! Without them, pests would multiply like crazy on our crops, and we would be left with famine on our hands. So as sad as it might be to admit, a room full of spiders might be more important than you and I.

There's also a chance that someone you know will use the excuse of your death as a reason to get out of an obligation. And there's also not a chance, but a fact that someone in your circle of friends will have no friends at their funeral because that friend will have been the last one alive.

This is typically part of the conversation where whoever I'm talking to tells me to stop fixating on stuff like this and just live in the moment. And I have to calmly explain to them that by the time our brains process the present moment, it's already in the past!

The "living in the moment" paradox seems obvious once you give it a moment, but our brains just can't help saying it automatically anyways. There are a lot of other things our brains can't help but do automatically, like reading every single street sign and billboard you pass by when you're looking out of a car window as a passenger, or listening to all the conversations happening within earshot, unless you're blocking them out with headphones or some other distraction.

In that sense, being in a foreign country where you can't speak the language must allow your brain to relax in a way that it hasn't been able to since you were a baby! All that forced reading and listening aside. I know I like to dunk on the English language, but it can be pretty cool sometimes! Every single thing that has ever been written in English, from Shakespeare to People magazine, has been written using the same 26 letters.

Speaking of those 26 letters, did you know Benjamin Franklin tried to remove six of them because he considered them too difficult to pronounce? Those letters were C, J, Q, W, X, and Y! For example, Franklin thought that the simultaneous hard and soft sound of the letter C could be replaced with a combination of K and S.

To be frank, he was definitely onto something! Coffee makes you hyper, but coffee shops are places where you go to chill. Alcohol, on the other hand, is a depressant, and yet clubs and bars are so damn stimulating. It's no wonder society changed forever when we replaced alcohol with coffee!

It's totally normal and cute to name your cat Whiskers or your dog Spot, but you can't name your kid Leg, Spine, or Freckle! While we're on the subject of body parts, has it ever occurred to you that your teeth are the only part of your skeletal system that require cleaning? It's weird, but it makes sense! After all, our femurs and skulls aren't the ones biting into that red-hot chicken wing!

Unless you're vegan, everyone loves the taste of carefully seasoned chicken wings, and why wouldn't we? They represent the pinnacle of human evolution! You're eating the wing that a bird couldn't use to escape us, covered in the spices that were once a plant's best attempt at warding us away! Made together in a process that's basically witchcraft!

Think about it: you place a dead animal, plants, and spices into a cauldron while following the instructions from a book written by old people! When we're not stealing spices from trees, we're cutting them down only to force them to relive their demise every single game night in the form of Jenga! No matter how intelligent or advanced we get as a species, though, there are some things that nature will just always beat us at.

Like, regardless of how many trees we kill, we'll still need them to build our coffins! And when you boil water to kill germs, you're still drinking them; they're just now dead! Although exterminators get paid to kill pests, they need those pests to be alive in the first place in order for them to make a living!

One good example of us continually trying and failing to be in control of our nature is falling asleep. We practice it every single night, yet for some of us, it never seems to get easier! All this weirdness creates a multitude of, well, bizarre things in society that we all just go along with. I mean, we literally concocted the concept of sports just so we could battle one another in a friendly manner!

As it turns out, we actually enjoy running around and chasing spheres as much as dogs do! You know, thinking about it, dogs are truly human's best friend—sadly, even more than another human! It's why some people will treat stray dogs a lot nicer than they treat homeless humans!

In movie scenes, where a dog gets hurt often feels more sad and disturbing than scenes where a human does. Just ask John Wick fans whose death hurt the most! Timing is everything. Depending on when you grew up, Barney was either a caveman, a dinosaur, an alcoholic, or a womanizer. If you run at 11 PM, you're a night person. If you run at 5 AM, you're a morning person. But if you run at 3 AM, you're just a suspicious person!

Turning your head to someone too quickly is aggressive, and turning it too slowly is ominous—meaning there's a perfect head turn rate to convey maximum friendliness! We all know these things on some level, but the question becomes whether or not we're wise enough to actually use them.

There's a difference: knowledge is knowing that you can carry out all the groceries at once. Wisdom is taking multiple trips so that by the time you're done, other family members have put most of them away. Well, unless you live alone! In that case, keep stacking those bags on your arm like a champ!

Family is everything! It's our first gateway into the world, a source of strength, joy, and laughter—at least that's what it's meant to be! Sadly, it isn't for everyone! As a child growing up with a family: the probability that your parents wanted and were expecting you is the highest if you were adopted.

Setting aside how wanted or unwanted you may have been, your parents can't escape the fact that it was their job to raise you. And your adult relationship with them is their performance review! Maybe that's why dads tell cheesy jokes—not because humor gets worse with age, but because the more life experience you have, the more value you place on making your loved ones laugh—even if it's at your own expense!

Especially considering the fact that you're more likely to get into arguments with your loved ones than with strangers! By the way, if your parents were wise enough back then, the teacher did not believe everything you see on TV, you should return the favor by teaching them not to believe everything they see on Facebook!

Social media is strange! The more lonely we are, the more we use it. But the more we're on social media, the more lonely we get. It's like a time loop of depression! If lawyers hope you get sued, doctors hope you get sick, cops hope you're a criminal, and mechanics hope you have car trouble, then only thieves wish you prosperity! At least there's always someone out there rooting for your success!

If you're unlucky, they might even be sneaking around in your own backyard! Oh, and by now you've probably recovered from learning that tomato is a fruit! But I also wanted to let you know that olive oil is a fruit juice, coffee is soup, and pizza is a sandwich!

This is a red circle! It's also the flag of Japan! It's also a pie chart showing how much of Japan is Japan! It's a hundred percent, by the way! You know, your perspective is everything! And in a way, reality can be whatever you want it to be! Neuroscience is the study of the brain by the brain! It's the study of the brain learning about itself!

Claustrophobic people don't like the feeling of being trapped in a small place with no way out, but if you think about it, your brain is trapped in your skull! But you're completely fine with that! Your reality is literally all in your head! Your hands are really just your brain's personal servants to interact with what it perceives to be real!

That begs the question: how can we know what exists outside of our subjective experiences if we can't ever step outside of our own head? It's simple: we can't! [Music] If the universe is a simulation, it might explain my insomnia.

There just might not be any room left on the sleeping server! But even then, the only way you can know you've fallen asleep is by waking up! You have absolutely no idea what happens to you while you're unconscious at night! You sleep for eight hours a day, meaning you're recharging your body for a third of your entire life!

We're really poor batteries! And as with all battery-powered things, we degrade over time! Chargers are honestly just life support for our electronics! Eventually, everything comes to an end! You've probably made multiple decisions that have saved your life without you ever realizing it! But that's not exactly true; it's impossible to save a life! You can only delay a death!

It can be scary! We all want to know our purpose in life, but maybe it's better we don't! A cow wouldn't want to know its purpose! Life is actually just generations of kids disciplining other kids, hoping that the next group does just a little bit better!

Humans aren't eternal—at least, not yet! The odds of you dying at any moment are pretty slim, but it's never zero percent! We all think humans are the dominant species on Earth, but what if plants were just farming us? Giving us the necessary oxygen we need to survive until about 100 years later when we ultimately die? Our bodies get thrown back into the soil where plants can then consume us!

This is how nature recycles. Death is the end of an old life. Decomposition is the beginning of new life. Everyone in the world, even you, is producing carbon dioxide, which plants need to grow to produce oxygen, which we need to survive! So if anyone says you're useless, just know you're helping keep everyone else alive just by existing!

It's all a cycle! There's order to all the chaos! Since plants and animals are mostly made of water, the evolution of all life is really the story of planets developing oceans and then eventually watching those oceans get up and start walking around!

Another way to look at it is that since all living things are made of the same stuff that stars are, in roughly the same proportions, the evolution of intelligent life is basically stars watching their siblings fall apart, then their corpses getting back up and trying to learn about themselves! It sounds insane because it is!

Everything could sound crazy if you word it the right way! Like, for example, when you're reading, you're literally looking at a dead tree and hallucinating! Every book you've ever read is just a remix of the dictionary! And if you touch your phone in just the right places, someone comes and brings you a pizza!

But that's a really small amount of actions taken! There exists a set of finite actions that, if you perform them in the correct order, would make you a millionaire in just a single day! You just don't know what they are! A million dollars is a lot of money, but a billion? It's almost inconceivable! For example, if you had one dollar for every year that the universe has existed—approximately 13.8 billion years—you wouldn't even make the top 50 on the Forbes list!

Speaking of Forbes listers, it's interesting that the two richest people on our planet are actively building businesses to build rockets to get off this planet! But you know the richest person on Earth is technically also the richest person in the universe? Since our definition of rich is owning a lot of Earth money, and there's no way for extraterrestrial life to obtain it—or is there?!

For all we know, humanity could have colonized other planets, other solar systems, and just left some of us on Earth as an experiment! Maybe one day they'll return, or maybe they won't! If these future humans were ever desperate for DNA from the past, there's a potentially viable source in all the bodies frozen on the trail near the top of Mount Everest.

We've done pretty well, I think! I mean, we're still alive at least! But to be honest, we've gotten pretty lucky! You know how babies are like constantly being loud, crying, screaming, or whatever? How do humans survive in the wild with that constant alarm going off all day? It really only gets worse the more there are!

The first parents to ever have identical twins must have been really, really confused! As kids, 99.9% of the times we cried was due to physical pain. As adults, though, 99.9% of the times people cry is due to emotional pain! Emotions can be hard to make sense of at times! Hospitals are a good example.

In a hospital, you can find people experiencing the worst, the happiest, the first, or the last days of their lives. There's plenty of tears shed in both the best and worst ways possible! But whether you're welcoming a new life or saying goodbye to an old one, some things never change. The number of people older than you never increases!

Your right elbow is and will forever remain untouched by your right hand! And the English language will forever be confusing! Have you ever realized that the word "short," "shorter," and "shortest" are actually just the long, longer, and longest versions of the word "short"?

Red goes into the toaster as a slice, but comes out as a piece! English makes me want to light my house on fire, but wait! Nothing is ever on fire; it's fire that is on things! But don't worry, you can put the fire out by putting the right things on fire! You got it? Good! Wait, now it's too dark in here!

Now that I think about it, dark is written with a K instead of a C! Probably because we can't see in the dark! We aren't afraid of being alone in the dark; we're afraid of the exact opposite! Actually, even when you think you're alone, you're not!

People cover the webcams on their computer because they're paranoid someone might be watching them, but yet no one ever covers their cell phone cameras! You're connected to everything, to everyone! If you live in the United States, the driveway to your house is, in one way or another, connected to every other driveway in the country.

And I guess in the same way, you could also say that your toilet is somehow connected to everyone else's toilet through the sewer system, which is kind of cute. Everyone needs a toilet buddy! Your parents always told you not to talk to strangers, but the only way to make friends is to literally talk to strangers!

Honestly, a lot of your social life was entirely predetermined by where your teachers assigned you to sit in class! We even grew up being told not to take candy from strangers, right? So why in any world does Halloween exist to do just the thing we've been saying not to do?

I understand, though! You need to be careful with who you interact with! For all you know, you could be knocking at a serial killer's doorstep! If a serial killer is chasing you, you're both literally running for your life! I hope you're quick! But don't run too fast! You might start sweating!

If you're wearing a sweater and you start sweating, doesn't that make you the sweater? Okay, we're back on English again! Never mind. I would tell you to go inside and cool off, but using solar panels to power your AC is like using the sun's power against itself! And I don't think picking a fight with the sun is the best idea!

Given the vastness of space and the massive amount of stars in the universe, if you randomly drew some stars on a page, your drawing is probably a very accurate representation of some particular cluster of stars in the sky! I guess you're just a natural-born artist—a modern-day Picasso! Our perception of time is really warped!

Sometimes, Picasso was alive when the Titanic sank, but at the same time, he was also alive to witness the first moon landing on television! We see these things, these people, as having existed in different times, but in reality, it was a lot more recent than you actually think! But this reminds me: the light of the moon is just a reflection of the sun, right?

So how come vampires don't burn at night? Something is off here! The world is constantly moving! I myself have never been to India, China, or Bangladesh, but about 70 to 80% of all my clothes have belts! Though they're probably some of the dirtiest items of clothing! People always touch them after they've used the bathroom! But think about it—when was the last time you washed a belt?

Yeah, doing laundry sucks, but I had an idea while doing mine today! If you just put a bunch of brains in a washing machine, is that considered brainwashing? And since we're on the topic of being brainwashed, someone somewhere in the world has probably dreamed about being in a relationship with you before, and in my case, I just feel really bad for them! It was probably a nightmare!

But hey, every time you meet someone in real life, your dreams pretty much unlock a new character so you can live the rest of your life out with them to the fullest extent until that alarm goes off! Uh, yes, 5 AM, the hour where you're either up really late or really early! When does it all get up and get ready for the day? Or brush your teeth and get ready for bed? Whatever you're doing at 5 AM is none of my business! I can only assume the worst!

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