The Shittification of the Vagus

I’m going to use a lot of profanity in this post. If you don’t like reading written profanity, you should probably stop now and go back to whatever you were doing before.

I hate AI.

Christopher Nolan is working on an adaptation of The Odyssey, a book I have long studied and appreciated, one of the source texts of modernity in the west, a foundational imaginal terrain for notions of the self. Apparently an early trailer of the movie is playing in front of the new Jurassic Park film. And so because modern people have iPhones, someone recorded this and put it up on the internet, and I read about it. The film comes out summer 2026. I’d like to take my family to see it. I thought I’d watch the trailer. So I go to Youtube, and type in ‘trailer for chistopher nolan’s The Odyssey.’ If you do this, what populates the query is a series of trailers purporting to be the one you are looking for, which are in fact laughably shitty AI versions. The problem?

These are a random selection of comments on one of the many fake AI trailers: this one has been viewed 119,000 times. For some reason that I cannot fathom, people cannot tell it is fake. (Apparently we also cannot spell or punctuate ;)

People cannot tell, it seems, the difference between a movie, and an AI-generated movie, or a picture of Tom Holland, and his AI-doppleganger. And this is getting rapidly acceleratingly worse. And by the way – there is no real trailer online– because whoever posted it had the post taken down because it was a copyright infringement.

I don’t care that much about Christopher Nolan’s film. What I care about is the following:

You go looking for a real thing, you don’t have expertise in the domain, the real thing is not there, and instead what is there are a thousand fake reproductions and you don’t know enough to realize that you are embracing a fake.

This brings me to the subject of this post.

Because I run a publisher, and because getting books shipped to Europe and Australia is a giant pain in the ass (shipping delays, import duties, etc.) we have had to stop ignoring Amazon.com as a distribution channel for our books.

And if you go to Amazon, and you search for books about the Vagus, what you find is this:

And this:

Let’s chose this one, and learn more about the book and the authors. I mean, this book has 183 5-star reviews. It must be fantastic!

Have a quick read:

The Vagus nerve is a complex ancient structure, huh? ‘A major player in your body’s autonomic nervous system.’ Apparently, as we start to get older, ‘our vagus nerve can start to deteriorate…’ Oh shit, I’d better keep reading so that I can assimilate this valuable information and refurbish my brain! Tell me more about where the Vagus originates, please…

I’ve highlighted some of my favorite passages above.

Besides giving some output to several organs, the vagus nerve is between 80% and 90% of nerves…

It gives output to some organs? And it is 80 to 90% made of nerves? Is it fucking really? The vagus nerve is made of nerves?

And the origin of the vagus includes:

The nucleus is ambiguous: which is apparently a ‘pair of nerve cells’…

The nucleus is ambiguous?
A pair of nerve cells? You mean neurons? A pair? You mean fucking two of them?

What the ACTUAL FUCK is this word salad?

This is a ‘book’ with 183 5-star reviews.

So, who wrote this?

I dutifully go to the author page, to learn more about Reiner Hartmann.

As I read this shit, I cannot help but feeling that – wait a minute – this was not written by a human. ‘Without realising it, I became a little art expert. And no, not the art of museums; the art of healthy, energetic, full living.’ A person would not say that. Nor would a person say that ‘every word I read seemed to veer my life off course, just by a few degrees.’ That is, however, the kind of tone-deaf mixed-metaphor automaton-bullshit that a machine attempting to emulate a human might say.

But if he was born on Sunday, the 8th of March, 1967 in Bologna, he must be a real person, right? And someone with such a celebrated book must have his own webpage, right? This isn’t his only publication. So go ahead, try to find this motherfucker.

You could look at his profile on Medium. This is assuredly the same person– he’s an expert on the vagus nerve. Yet oddly, he only has a single follower. Hmmm.

What about this person on Instagram? He is Rainer Hartmann, and he is in Italy… Only wait- the first name is spelled differently.

Is it this Reiner Hartmann?

Only he was born in 1945, and the Reiner Hartmann we are looking for told us he was born in 1967.

At this point, you can probably see where I’m headed with this.

REINER HARTMANN, author of the The Polivagal Theory & Daily Vagus Nerve Exercises is NOT A REAL FUCKING PERSON which I probably should have realized from the sub-title that talks about REFURBISHING MY BRAIN.

Ready for another shocker? His co-author, Lisa Snee? Not a real fucking person either. I know, shocking.

Guess what? She doesn’t exist. The gall! She has an actual listed birthday, and she’s not fucking real. So whose photograph is that? I have no fucking idea. Is it even a real person?

I mean, there is a real Lisa Snee who is a counselor in the UK, but it’s not the same person. No way. And the Lisa we are looking for works as a researcher and professor, and has made a name for herself as an author.

Now I know you will be shocked to discover that Elena Wilder, the author of the successful The 28-Day Vagus Nerve Reset, is not a real person either.

Let’s take a peek inside Elena’s masterpiece: the 28-day Vagus Nerve Reset, to see what we can learn…

Notice any similarities to the previous book? Just maybe even at the level of font selection and layout? Or the strange way the sciencey-writing sounds like it has been translated into English from another language with different grammatical rules?

The importance of the vagus goes far beyond anatomy? What the fuck does that sentence mean? Seriously.

I think you’ll not be surprised to realize that the stylistic similarities between these two books are due to the fact that THEY WERE BOTH WRITTEN BY A FUCKING AI.

Possibly here:

More not real people with best-selling vagus books?

Eva Greenleaf

Noah Mercer

I hate AI.