I suspect that, if it was not said tongue in cheek, what the chap meant was that if you were to become dis-oriented then you should switch on the autopilot and so allow the aircraft to avoid extreme attitudes.
Having said that there are planes, granted they are bigger ones, in which the auto pilot, or at least the aircraft's computer controls are far more effiecient at returning the aircraft to normal flight after an upset than pilots are. Do not some modern passenger aircraft fly so on the edge of control in some circumstances that it is almost impossible for a pilot to stabilise oscillations without the help of the computers or is that just fiction?