I Spent Nine Hours (And This Week's Grocery Budget) Making an AI Lego Iran Video And My Brain Is Now Soup

Other men in my demographic spent this week on responsible adult activities. I spent it doing THIS. Send help. Send groceries.

A few days ago I shared an Iran lego video on the Wise Wolf YouTube channel. It was a low-res amateur thing I found on Substack. I thought it was funny. I posted it. I closed the tab. I went on with my life like a normal person who does not pay rent in a haunted motel.

Yesterday Lily messaged me. Hey boss, did you see that Iran lego video has a thousand times more views than anything else on the channel? I had not seen. I checked. She was right. A scrappy little video I had not made, had not edited, had not even bothered to caption properly, was outperforming everything Lily and I had ever produced. The Wise Wolf YouTube channel, after years of sober investigative work, was being carried on the back of a low-resolution legoland propaganda short I had found while eating cereal.

So I figured out the next move pretty quickly. The next move was to make one myself.

The next nine hours of my life were what professionals call “AI video generation,” and what I call “watching my soul get extracted through my GPU one frame at a time.” I spent roughly two hundred dollars in AI tokens, which, if you have never paid for video generation, costs approximately what a small horse costs, except the horse at least produces fertilizer.

Every prompt costs money. Every regeneration costs money. Every “huh that’s not quite right, let me tweak it” costs money. By hour four I was no longer creating video, I was negotiating with a slot machine that spoke broken English and occasionally hallucinated extra fingers. By hour seven I had developed a personal relationship with my error logs. By hour nine my Japanese girlfriend, who is a girl and is my friend and has given me explicit written permission to call her my girlfriend because I do what I want, looked at the final video and said “this is lowkey amazing wolf.”

That is the highest compliment I have received from another human being in 2026, and I am taking it.

My brain is currently the consistency of warm yogurt, and I am about to lay down for three hours and stream old episodes of Doctor Katz Professional Therapist, because that show was, and remains, an underrated masterpiece of comedy delivered by a man who sounded like he was talking to you through a screen door from the next apartment.

So here it is. The video. I am sharing it because I worked too hard not to.

(CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON. IT IS THE ARROW. THE TRIANGLE-SHAPED ARROW. THE ONE THAT HAS BEEN ON EVERY VIDEO DEVICE SINCE 1992. YOU CAN DO IT!)

Then I will wake up and get right back to it. Because I have a horrible life, and apparently that is the brand now.

Watch the video. Or do not. I am too tired to lobby you either way.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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