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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein · Why We Do What We Do

• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Why We Do what We Do.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: I am your reanimated host Abraham.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: And I am your Scientific Misstep host Shane.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: We are a psychology podcast. We talk about the things
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: that humans and non human animals do, and in the
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: month of October we take some time to cover some
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: spooky topics because Halloween is this month, and what a
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: better time to celebrate sort of the macabre than in
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: the season dedicated to that very subject.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, today we are covering Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Now here's
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: the thing. We're going to talk about the story because
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: the story itself is fascinating and it is a science
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: story at its core. Yeah, and we're going to talk
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: about how it was written, which is just fun happenstance.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: And then we're going to talk about the psychology of it,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: because you know, we're a psychology podcast. And ye, could
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: we really reanimated corpse? Well maybe, And that's the scary thing.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: We can animate this podcast episode, We certainly can. This
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: is our fifth year doing Halloween episodes. So far this
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: year we have covered the Bermuda triangle and we have
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: covered the variance of Hell. Anyway, our full length episodes
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: come out on Wednesdays. Our mini episodes come out on Mondays,
• 1:31
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• 1:33
  Speaker 2: kind of a lot of stuff for two people for
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: whom this podcast is like a thing we do on
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: the side for fun. Yeah, we keep ourselves so busy.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: It's a project. It's a side project.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it feels like a career, but it's actually
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: a side project. We keep ourselves so busy. So anyway,
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: welcome so much. We are glad that you joined us.
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  Speaker 2: us on Patreon, pick up some merch, tell a friend.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: I'll talk more about those at the end of this discussion.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: But I want to also wish everyone a happy Blind
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Americans Equality Day. It's very important.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, it's also Broad Day, USA.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Oh. I thought maybe it was just br.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe I don't know. I think it's I think
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: it's broad Day, but it could like it could be bra, Like,
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: what's up bra? That would be that would be fun.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: It would make sense that it's bra as in the clothing,
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: the garments, because it's also Breast Health Day.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's fair. It's also Global Dignity Day. It
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: is Global hand Washing Day. It's so important now more
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: than ever since we've gotten rid of preventive medicine yes, yes,
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: and effective medicine. Yeah. Yeah. I'm reading Do You Believe
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: In Magic? By Paul Offit right now and I'm just like, oh,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: it's very good. Is this is this new No, it's
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: an older one. It's I think it was.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Okay, but it is good.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: It's it's it's just about pseudoscience and how yeah. Yeah,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: people get into it. So anyway, ponus recommendation. If you
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: want something scary, it's hagfish Day. It's I Love Lucy Day.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Oh that's fun.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: It is Love your Body Day. Speaking of which, it's
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: National Cheese curd Day.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: I support that. It is National fossil Day mmm.
• 3:21
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• 3:24
  Speaker 2: know who you are, it is National grouch Day.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Man, love that trash can monster. It is National mushroom Day.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Love that.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh yeah, that could be Abraham Day. I
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: love it. It is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day,
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: very important.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: Yes, it is National PUG Day.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: It is National take your Parents to Lunch Day. That's sweet,
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: that's so wholesome. It is White Cane Safety Day. We
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: have so many holidays because it's also bone Joint Health
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: Action Week.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: It certainly is. It's also Improved your Home Office Week.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: It's Infection control Week. Also, really appreciate that.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Yep. It is meditation week.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: It is a meditation or mediation.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: It's mediation week.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, I mean honestly, it could be a typo. Could
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: go either way. It could be it is pet peeve week.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: Maybe being correct about typos might be a pet peeve.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: That doesn't bother me. I know I type fast and
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: often capitalized letters that shouldn't be capitalized, So that's fine.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: It is a school lunch week, so get your school
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: lunch rectangle pizza.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's finally teen read week, so get your
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: Rectangle book and read it.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, please do.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: But we do more than just talk about holidays. We
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: talk about psychology things, and then we talk about spooky
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: psychology things. And as you mentioned, Shane, and I'm just
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: gonna say it again, we thought it'd be really fun
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: to visit Mary Shelley's Frankenstein because this is one of
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: my favorite horror books. It is an incredibly well written,
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: beauty full story that's just tragic and heartbreaking and extremely
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: well constructed. And the story behind it is pretty much
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: equally fascinating to the story itself, which is I think
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: a hard feat to pull off. So we're gonna we're
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: going to talk about that. I think that's all the
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: preamble before we get to our topic. Is there anything
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: I'm missing or you would like to add before we
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: start talking about a monster? No, I think we're good, beautiful, Well,
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: let's begin. Then, many of us are familiar with the
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: story of Frankenstein or some version of it in some capacity. Yeah,
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: and this is that in this story, a scientist decides
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: to violate the laws of God and bestow life upon
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: inanimate matter to create an undead creature that subsequently reeks
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: havoc along the countryside. And that's our topic. But we
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: also want to ask the question could this really happen? Like,
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: could science accomplish such a feat?
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah? And so in this booky entry, we learn how
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Greek mythology, volcanoes, the alps, and brains are all connected.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: Whoa, we haven't done one of these in a minute,
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: I forgot.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought that'd be fun.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: I love that that throwback connecting all things together.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, let's get into it. Let's I mean,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: so we are going to talk about the story Mary
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Shelley's Frankenstein as like the primary thing, because the story
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: itself is interesting. So this book was subtitled The Modern Prometheus.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: There's your Greek mythology. Yeah, so it's Frankenstein or the
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Modern Prometheus, and Frankenstein is the eighteen eighteen novel written
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: by a young, very young Mary Shelley.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: Yes, so in this in the story, the short version
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: of this you may or may not be familiar with, listener,
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: is that scientist Victor Frankenstein or Frankenstein. What persuasion you
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: hail from Frankenstein? He decides he's going to do a
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: science experiment in which he makes a creature from different
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: body parts and animates it to life, and when it works,
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: he panics upon seeing his newly created creation and runs away,
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: leaving the creature completely alone. That's very confused, barely aware creature,
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: and upon returning the following day, the creature is now gone,
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: so he is cobbled together some corpus pieces bestowed them
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: with life.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: He's terrified at what he's.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: Done and runs away, and then the thing that he
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: created is gone, and he's sort of like, okay, I
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: let me get my heart rate back to normal.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in his time away he learns
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: the creature specifically, he wakes up and goes, what the
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: f and then he goes. He goes on, and he
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: learns to make fire, He learns to speak, and he
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: learns to read by observing people. He even saves a
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: little girl from drowning, only to be shot by the
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: child's father. The father's like, no, don't do that and
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: shoots him, and so, you know, this obviously upsets the creature,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: and he turns his rage back on humanity and specifically
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Victor himself. He kills Victor's brother and frames someone else
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: in the family as a revenge plot.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Yes, and we should have maybe started with spoiler warning
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: in case you wanted to read this book and just
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: weren't familiar with it. I mean, it's a.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Fairly new new read in eighteen eighteen.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's over two hundred years old, so welcome to
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: the brand new club, I guess. But it's still a
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: great story, and like we are not going to do
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: justice to how beautifully written the prose is, and yes,
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: how eloquently the story is actually told. So even knowing
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: the actual plot, I think you can find great joy
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: in this text. Yeah, you should go read it regardless. Yeah,
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: but we continue on. So the monster has killed people,
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: he has saved people. He's a complex character here, Frankenstein's
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: monster is. During this time, though, Victor did not learn
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: his lesson, and instead he decides to create the bride
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: of Frankenstein. The bride of the monster, specifically, the monster's lonely.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: He wants a partner and asks for a partner, and
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: he decides he is going to create a partner because
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: the creature has specifically requested this. He says, like, I
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: please give me something like I have nobody. I am lonely.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: I just want to have like someone I can have
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: a relationship with. But then Frankenstein also realizes, well, if
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: I create this, if I create a partner for this beast,
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: they might even have undead baby things. And so Instead,
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: he decides to destroy his second experiment, and this creature,
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: who's already kind of enraged and was like, now finally
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: getting his hopes up that maybe there's some justice in
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: the world, maybe I won't be so lonely, maybe I'll
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: have a companion. And so he gets his hopes up,
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: and then his partner to be is destroyed and he's
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: very upset, and so he murders Victor's wife on their
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: wedding night, which causes Victor's dad to die with grief later.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: So Victor's life is also like just laden with tragedy. Yeah.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, By the end of this book, the only person
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: that's left alive in Victor's family is his brother, his brother.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: I believe his brother's name is Evan, and so yeah,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: that's the only person that's a lif Now at this point,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Victor's like, ooh, you Sonovich and he goes after the creature, right,
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: So now Victor wants revenge. He chases the creature and
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: he follows him and follows him and follows him for
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: months and eventually leads him to the Arctic, and at
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: some point in time, Victor is trying to walk across
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: like a pretty large field or you know, spread of ice,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: and he passes out. He basically like passes out from
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: exhaustion hypothermia because it's the Arctic, and so a ship
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: comes in saves him, and he retells this whole story
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: to the ship crew and in all those folks, and
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: then he dies on the ship, but the creature jumps
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: onto the ship. He boards the ship, and he is
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: very very sad that Victor is gone because he has
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: a very complex emotional relationship with Victor. He's mad at him,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: he's mad at humanity, but he also loves him and
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: sees him as like a father type of figure and
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: the person that could have you know, given him all
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: these things. And he tells the crew, you know what,
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: this is a real bummer. I'm gonna go and I'm
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: gonna burn myself alive on a pyre. And then he
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: just leaves the ship and that's the end of the book.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, real, uh it, real downer, real downer,
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: really tragic. But man, what just incredibly constructed story. To
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: think through all of these plot elements, and honestly, I
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: think this is where we get to move to the
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: next interesting point, which is understanding how this story came
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: to be, which was not with the help of ads.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: All right, we're back.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Interesting note though, before we dive into more of the
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: history behind the story, is commenting on our ads because
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: we do not choose our ads here, and we found
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: out that we sometimes get ads we would definitely not choose.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so hopefully that wasn't like a pro life ad
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: because that happened in our Hell episode ironically. Yeah, if
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: you're listening and you hear an ad that you don't
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: think aligns with our values as a podcast, please let
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: us know so we can adjust that and make sure
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: that we don't allow that to happen if we can. Yeah.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Victor Frankenstein, he wanted to he was pro life
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: and then he created a monster and then it was
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: like not pro.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Life he was.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's what the He was pro life and the
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: creature for the story.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was a pro life. It was a
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: pro life allegory, except the creature became pro choice and
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: decided that he was kind of choose to remove people
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: from this planet.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So anyway, just wanted to note that
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: about ads. Okay, so let's get into the interesting lore
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: behind this story because, as I said at the top,
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: I think this is really fascinating. Yeah, so, as many
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: of us know, people listeners us Mary Shelley, the author
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: of this tale, She was actually only eighteen years old
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: at the time of writing this story. Now, to be fair,
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: in eighteen eighteen, this would be like being forty five
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: years old today, like half way through life.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Just kidding.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: There are actually a lot of considerations around like length
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: of life at this time, but eighteen, like that's just
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: how much experience could you have had at that point.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: That's pretty impressive.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: I definitely did not write a best selling novel by
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: the time I was eighteen years old. No, no, no,
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: but we digressed. I was writing bad poetry when I
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: was eighteen. Yeah, So it's important to though. Mary Shelley too,
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: like grew up in a kind of an interesting space.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: Her mama died during childbirth or like just after childbirth,
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: so she never knew her mom, and then her dad
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: was I believe, a philosopher, and then her stepmom was
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: a scientist as well or something like that. There was
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: like she was surrounded by like science, and that's going
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: to be critically important for understanding why she wrote the
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: way that she wrote so it was kind of just
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: kind of a cool thing. So she actually began writing
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: the story in during the Year Without Summer, and what
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: ends up happening is in eighteen sixteen, there are these
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: huge climate abnormalities that resulted in significant global temperature drops.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: They resulted in crop failures and food shortages across Europe
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: and the northern Hemisphere.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Really there's a lot of problems for folks. And it
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: was the equivalent of what could be described as a
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: volcanic winter, primarily due to a volcanic eruption. So there
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: was the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. It was
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: the large eruption at that time in over thirteen hundred
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: years and actually directly impacted climate in northern Hemisphere. So
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: the Year without Summer was basically just saw cold, like
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: lots of cold times that were like much colder temperatures
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: than they were used to.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: I think that we discussed this eruption during our episode
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: on like End of Days, Yeah, sort of interpretations and predictions. Yeah,
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: like this was a big deal, Like it had people
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: really scared because they really didn't understand weather at all
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: in the eighteen hundreds, Like it was pretty mystical and unpredictable,
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: and like they tried to they were like trying to
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: track patterns of weather, but that was about as precise
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: as they were getting. Is like, around this time last year,
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: we had rain, so maybe we'll have raining in this year.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: But then you have these anomalies like a volcano erupting
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: that completely disrupt things. And they're like, this is the end.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: We are at rapture. Note yeah, not to be too topical,
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: I guess, but anyway, yeah, it was.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: It was a big deal.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: So this event happens and Mary Shelley and her friends
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: they're like having this very weird summer. They ended up
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: being stuck inside during their visit to Lord Byron in
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: the Swiss Alps in eighteen sixteen, and because there was
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: no summer because it was cold because the volcanic ash
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: had essentially blocked the sun from reaching the planet very effectively,
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: the weather was too cold for them to enjoy the outdoors,
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: so instead they remained indoors and they had this sort
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: of competition sort of thing. I mean, not a directly competition,
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: but it was more of a like, let's challenge each
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: other to write stories, and they took turns reading ghost
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: stories from the Book of Phantasmagoriana, which led to a
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: proposal from Lord Byron, let's all write scary ghost story
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: and John Pilladori, one of the members of Lord Byron Society,
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: would go on to write The Vampire, which serves as
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: one of the most influential volumes in the lore of
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: the vampire genre.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so for those of you who have never read
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Chuck Pallinook or Poloniak or however you might say his name,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: CHUCKI p Chuckie p you know, author of Fight Club
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: and Choke and Invisible Monsters and all that. The collection
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: of short stories that he did called Haunted is based
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: on this event. It's a group of authors that got
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: together that were dared to write the scariest story. And
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: that's what Haunted is. It's like all the authors writing
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: their scary stories. So it's like this story itself is
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: like a very influential story for like the horror genre too,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: which is really interesting. Right. So during their conversation about stories,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: someone happened to mention the idea of or reanimated corpse.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: And at this point in time, Mary Shelley is very nervous.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Every day they're asking or do you have a story,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: do you have a subject? And she's like, no, I don't,
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: And then somebody brings up the idea of reanimating corpses,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: and then Shelley has this kind of idea and she
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: has this on top of she wakes up from a
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: nightmare about this specific kind of event going on on
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: and so giving her kind of her interest in science
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: and specifically the topic of galvinism. She had an idea
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: and began writing the first draft of the story. If
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: you don't know what galvinism is, this is kind of
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: a big deal. Galvinism is how electric currents within biological
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: organisms are generated and related to contraction and convulsion. During
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: this time when Galvinism starts to kind of emerge, what
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: ends up happening is kind of at the time people
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: are discovering electricity, they're learning about electricity, and they're really
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: kind of learning all these things, and galvinism is completely
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: discovered by accident, which we'll talk about later. But Shelley
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: is really interested in that particular thing, and so the
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: story of Frankenstein starts to emerge.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like the understanding of electricity had been around for
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: a little while, but this was pre commercialization. Yeah, like
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: you were not going to go into a place and
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: find electrical anything. Yet you had people experimenting with it.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: You had sort of stories and more about it, and
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: you definitely had some mythical properties attributed to it. But
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: people did understand like, this is a power, this is
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: a force. It is real and in the world we
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: can see it. We can't yet harness it, not really
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: like kind of versions of it. We can, but we
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: can't necessarily. We just don't understand it very well yet.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: But they did know about this this whole like view,
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: you can if electrical current is run through biological material,
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: it could result in contraction that material.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: And at the time too, people are looking at like
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: organisms moving around and be like how do they move?
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Like what energizes them? So there's like looking at like
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: spiritual forces or had divine forces or galvanic forces.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Or like the spark of life is what comes up
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: a lot and you will we'll talk about that too.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: But this was before the War of Currents, right, yes, much, Yeah,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: decades before before Tom Sedison started like you know, basically
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: using propaganda to make sure that his electricity wasn't used
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: for the electric chair.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you know, before this, you know, we
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: we had I think I don't remember what year it
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: would have been, but Benjamin Franklin was like, you know,
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: we can use electricity to like do stuff with it,
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: and but like again, it just it wasn't really available yet.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: The idea of it causing death was known, but the
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: idea of it causing life was kind of newish. But yeah, anyway,
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: that's a big a side on electricity. We're at the
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: point now where Shelley has been, I guess inspired by
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: this conversation about reanimation and galvanism, and she actually then
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: she the muse strikes, she gets the creative bug, and
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: she and she continued to write, and she had this
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: to say about it quote. I saw the pale student
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: of nhallowed arts, kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Frightful must it be? For supremely frightful would be the
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: of the creator of the world. End quotech it's it's
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: very telling. That's how she even talked about that, because again,
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: her writing is just so poetic. Yeah, and it's actually
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: kind of funny too, because in the story they really
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: do not elaborate very much on the process of reanimating
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: the corpse. All the like story and lore we get
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: about Frankenstein throwing the switch and harnessing lightning and like
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: running that to the creature. That was like an interpretation
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: of this quote. Yeah, and not directly from the story itself.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, the whole It's Alive is a dramatization
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: of what actually happens in the book. Yeah. More likely
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: what happens is Victor goes, oh, it has to run,
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Like he gets real nervous, Like he's like, oh yeah,
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: Like he's basically like this this was a mistake, you know,
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: like he was not thrilled with what happened.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: No, yeah, Like immediately he's like, I was so interested
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: in this idea of like animating a dead thing, and
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: so he animates this corpse and the eyes start to
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: flutter open, and he's.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Like, what have I done?
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: And then but like doesn't even say anything, it's just
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: like sees it flutter open and pain and runs like,
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: there's no dialogue here, but we need we need to tell,
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: don't show.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: In the movies they yell what you know, he's alive?
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So at this point in time, you know,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: she writes this draft and with the encouragement of her husband,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: she in the unfortunate suicide of her half sister Franny,
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: she actually begins working on a longer novel version from
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: the draft. She eventually finishes the book in Bath in
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: eighteen sixteen, So she does. Bath is is actually one
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: of the settings of in the novel as well, and
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: so she does finish it at this time and starts
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: to kind of work out and do the editing and
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: stuff like that to make this like a more you know,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: kind of fleshed out novel.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: And to be clear, it wasn't a bath tub. It
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: was the place.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: It was a city of Bath region.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I called Bath And there's some fun stories about that. Okay.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: So uh, let's see we've gotten to the part where
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: she actually has gotten to the novel version of this,
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: and then she had to sell it, so she had
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: to run some ads, she.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Act she did. There were ads for this which is great.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: All right, we're back.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: We're finishing up a little bit of the story or
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: just the background of the story of understanding how this
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: novel of Frankenstein came to be. She finishes eventually finish
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: the story in bath in eighteen sixteen. The creature in
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: the story is slightly different than some interpretations in the movies.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: The creature is often called Frankenstein and is sort of
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: confused for Frankenstein. It's unable to speak and moves with
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: like a zombie like motion. In the novel, the creature
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: is actually highly intelligent and verbose. It is described as
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: very tall and even elaborates slightly that Frankenstein made it
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: like very strong, but it like it feels pain, it
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: has experiences, it learns. It originally wakes and like there's
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: this description where for a long time it doesn't know
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: how to make sense of its sensory input. It's like
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: getting vision and here and is like doesn't really know
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: what that all means. And eventually it starts to like
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: organize itself around that stimulation and then just like watches
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: people to learn how to talk and eventually how to read.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, in the story, he does camp out in like
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: a kind of like a hovel in the woods and
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: is watching a family. So you know, like in some
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: interpretations in like the classic like Boris Carlisle like adaptation
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: of it, where you know, he goes into the woods,
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: he kills the blind man, he actually actually kills the
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: little girl, like and it's all like a creature just
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: going like I'm figuring things out, what does this all mean?
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a monster,
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: and uh. And in this one, it's like, actually, no,
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: like he's doing a lot of pre planning and like
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: and really is you know, pretty angry, but he does
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: like actually learn. He's reading like like Plutarch and like
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff that's like philosophy. He's reading like
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: stuff that I couldn't read, you know.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: So basically what I'm saying is this reanimated thing is
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: much smarter than I am. But also I think another
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: interpretation too, and you'll see this in a lot in
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: a lot of media, is that the creature is often
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: depicted as like, you know, Frankenstein has gone and robbed
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: graves and stolen body parts and just kind of sown
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: random body parts together to create this thing, and that's
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: actually not what is going on like Frankenstein's monster. What
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: it is is like he actually cobbled together the parts
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: of the body using dissected inanimate tissues rather than like
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: specific body parts. Like he's not going and finding an arm.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: He's like grabbing tissues like leftover meats and stuff from
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: slaughtered animals and stuff from the local slaughterhouse and whatnot.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: So it's a little bit different than just kind of
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: like grave robbing and then sowing all the parts together.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it kind of, like you said, they don't
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: really elaborate very much on the process, but they kind
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: of allude to the idea that he sort of like used.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: It's like this is one's tissue, and then he, with
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: the level of expert precision I don't think we could
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: expect from any of the world's top surgeons today, is
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: able to like turn this into functional joint tissue and
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: muscle tissue and yeah, like even like cranial, vertebral and
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: even neurological tissue. Like it's it's pretty impressive how Frankenstein,
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: I think greatly exceeds all known philosophy of modern technology
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: to put this together. Yeah, but that's okay, what does
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: wave our hand at it and say, like that's what
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: he did. It's great.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: As I was writing the notes for this, it made
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: me think of like how science fiction turns of science
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: fact very often it's true, and how like you know
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: a lot of times like something like this will beget
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: scientific questions and then like ultimately will lead to developments
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: based on what we can imagine, right, Like Isaac Asimov
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: has some of that stuff in his works where he
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: kind of created some ideas and then that will ended
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: up being researched. Like Star Trek is another example where
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: like cell phones are like a direct idea from Star Trek.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Like they were like, oh, well, what if we did
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: or skype in FaceTime? Right, Like video conferencing is an example.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: It comes from Star Trek. They're like, I bet we
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: could do that. And so like I always liked the
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: idea of like science fiction turning the science fact like,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: and this is one of those stories that does that
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: a little bit.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and some of those, like I know, there is
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: like a lot of sort of converging factors that led
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: to it and the like. There are inspirations for things, sure,
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: there are some that are like directly from some of
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: those science fiction and I forget what they are, but
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: it'd be fun to maybe do an episode some point
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: of where we talked about like fiction becomes reality because
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: there are somewhere Like it was really clearly this thing
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: would not exist without this creative, this imagining from someone else. Right,
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: it's less about them predicting the future than creating it,
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: which is kind of its own unique take on it.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for sure, like that. Maybe that's a mini too.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: We could just do that science fic to science faction
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: or something like that.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that'd be fun. But anyway, this all sort
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: of begs the question, as I said, like Victor Frankenstein's
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: achievement in creating a corpse from just like visceral tissue
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: that's found around is a pretty remarkable story. But I
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: think even without that level of sophistication, we can still
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: ask the question that I think many of us might have,
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: which is is it even possible to reanimate a corpse?
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: Like could we do it? And what would happen if
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: we did do it?
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah? I was thinking about this too, Like, Okay, so
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: there's you know, there's like the practical there's practical ethical
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: and moral questions inside of this, but like I think
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: that the practical question is like can we do it?
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: And then my my psychology brain is like, well, what
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: would what would that be? What would that experience be? Like,
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: like what would it be like waking up like your
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: brain like and we can talk about that in a second,
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: but like you're you are, like you all of a
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: sudden achieved consciousness in a body that you don't recognize
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: or that is like piecemeal together. So like just like
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: what would that do to a person? You know? So
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: like I kind of want to unpack that too, But yeah,
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: let's talk about the science of monsters and what this
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: looks like. So I love this quote from Mary Shelley
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: in Scientific Pursuit there is continual food for discovery and
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: wonder And she says this in Frankenstein, which is like,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: but she she subscribed to this idea, Like, like I said,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: she grew up around scientists. She grew up in the
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: pursuit of knowledge. She grew up in this idea of
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: like learning about the world. So despite being kind of
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: just a you know, people think of her as like
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: a horror fiction author, she was somebody who was like
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: vast influence and interested in the workings of science at
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: the time.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think you could read Frankenstein and get
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: from an allegory about how science is dangerous because we
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: overstep our bounds. But I think what she was really
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: trying to say is like science is amazing and wonderful
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: and we need to know our place in the universe
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: and not try to step into God's shoes. Yeah, but
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: not that it was anti science, although I think some
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: people will read that into it. She seemed like she
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: was quite interested in supporting the idea of science. But
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: it's sort of like, for the purposes of telling a
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: scary story, what if scientists went too far and they
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: did not think about or know their place in the world. Right,
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean Shelley had a great interest in
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: modern science while writing the novel, and so I think
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: in the description of animating this corpse, she's very sparing
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: with the details. So we don't know maybe what she
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: was alluding to, but we can ask the question like
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: does the science add up? And there are three things
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: to unpack here. There's the very most general question of
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: like reanimating dead tissue, but there is also an important
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: part and we kind of covered this and we did
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: an episode a long time ago of like would a
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: head transplant work? Yeah, and that it's like re establishing
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: brain and nerve connections, because the issue with a brain
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: transplant I think that people aren't considering or head transplant
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: is like reconnecting those millions of neurons to the spine
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: and the muscle tissue and like having that work somehow,
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: like in the movie get Out for example, Like would
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: that actually work?
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: It would require a level of expert precision not currently
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: capable to us, right anyway, So that's the second thing.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: So the three things ranimating dead tissue, re establishing brain
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: nerve connections, and the psychology of being a dead brain
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: that's now in a new reanimated body.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, complex, complex moral and ethical questions, right.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and like just pragmatic practical question.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: Pragmatic Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, And just to kind of
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: like lay the groundwork right now, like is widely accepted
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: that something like a brain trans plant or you know,
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: like like we talked about in that episode of body
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: transplant full body transplant, the idea is that we just
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: don't have the technology to do it, right, Like that's
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: like current status twenty twenty five. We don't have it
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: let alone eighteen eighteen, So just I think at the
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: time it's recording, maybe next year we'll have this option.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Who knows, because this timeline is absolutely absurd. So but
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: I do think it's important to start with kind of
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: like where this idea of using electricity to reanimate like
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: reanimate tissue comes from. And that goes back to what
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: we talked about earlier, which was galvinism. So galvinism found
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: its footing like before Mary Shelley started writing this, and
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: it kind of started with this idea. William Abernathy, which
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: is just such a seventeen hundreds eighteen hundreds name, and
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: William Lawrence. There were two folks often debating the idea
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: of the life principle, and Abernathy argued that life was
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: a kind of spark, and so you'll see how the
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: metaphor of electricity shows up, right. So Abernathy argued that
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: that life was a kind of spark that was added
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: to tissue, really important here, while Lawrence argued that life
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: existed within the body itself, so like it didn't it
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: didn't you didn't add the spark. The spark was already
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: there in the biology. And so that was actually kind
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: of like a big ongoing debate that Mary Shelley found
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: really interesting and actually super influential when kind of putting
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: together the idea of how to bring the creature to life.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: Sure, and then you pair this ongoing debate with the
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: discovery and the sort of advances in the ability to
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: harness electricity and even create electricity, and you essentially have
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: the perfect intersection of science and the un answered questions.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Luigi Galvani was a surgeon at the University of Bologna, Bologna.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: Bolooney, I was just saying the University of Bologne, which
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: is a lot of fun.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, that was just me though, So yes, that's a
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: very very fair point. Was the surge of the university
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: at Bolognay not to be confused with Trump University, I
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: mean Bologna, Bologna University. During a dissection of a frog
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: near a static electricity machine, he accidentally touched the frog's leg,
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: resulting in a brief shock that caused the frog's leg
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: to twitch. Hence tissue was now moving seemingly on its own,
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: having been giving a spark a tickle of electricity.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that goes to the abernathy argument that right, that
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: like life is the spark that's added to the tissue,
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: and like you could see how somebody would go see
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: see and that's how you know that happens. But like
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: you know, obviously we know something different. But like this
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: was at the time, this was dubbed animal electricity, and
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: Galvani began to experiment with tissues and electricity, which eventually
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: led to the development of the theory of bioelectricity. This
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: is something it came down the pike later. Now Galvani's
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: nephew took it a step further and began applying his
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: work to human corpses. If you ever want to read
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: really great science on human corpses and research and stuff
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: like this and where it comes from, check out Stiff
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: by Mary Roach. Like there's some really cool stuff in there,
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: and they do kind of mention some of this a
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: little bit.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: Bonus recommend number two.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it. And this was the idea that
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: this specific idea that Galvani's nephew had, which was applying
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: electricity to human corpses, it gave Shelley the idea for
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: the what was called the spark of being, which is
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: specifically reference in the book, and the spark of being
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: is used to bring the creature to life in the
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: story of the Novelzation.
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so, okay, we are not neuroscientists, but we're going
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: to just do a brief sort of review here, which
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: is that thinking about the neuroscience of this whole thing,
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: we really need to remember that the brain is as
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: weird and it's complex, and there are kind of two
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: major issues. The brain that is used is not a
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: living brain, and the connections to the brain for the
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: nervous system are severed, and those two things pose pretty
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: insurmountable problems because brain tissue famously does not last very
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: long without the life sustaining support that keep it going.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: It needs blood, it needs oxygen, it needs to be protected,
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: and it sort of needs continual input and use with
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: periodic opportunities for rest. And if those processes are interrupted,
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: the brain becomes a lump of meat that is capable
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: of nothing anymore, kind of like.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: What happens when you listen into ads. Okay, so we're
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: back and we're talking about this idea of the brain
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: being this thing that is really complex and basically a
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: lump of meat when you lose all of its connections
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: and all of it's like life sustaining properties. Now I
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: read something really interesting that I want to drop in
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: real quick here is that in the context of brain
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: slash full body transplants, when we were kind of talking
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: about that, some people like truly believe that the brain
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: was immune to the rejection process, the organ rejection process
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: compared to other organs. They're like, yeah, the brain can't
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: get rejected. Well, I laughed because I was reading it.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: I was like, well, I reject my brain all the time.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: I'm like, man, You're like, you know, I do that.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: So it's it's one of those things where it's like,
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: I don't think the words. I think that we still
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: are at the very like the fringe of understanding how
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: all this works, right sure, which I think brings us
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: to the question of like, can we even reanimate a brain,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: given that the tissue is dead, that it's that's lost
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: its blood flow, that it's lost all these things, can
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: we even reanimate that? Well, some researchers in twenty nineteen
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: were able to take pig brains and restore some cellular
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: functioning following their slaughter, or at least that's kind of
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: what they were arguing they were able to kind of
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: see this, this kind of this functioning going on, and
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: this didn't represent full brain activity or anything close to
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: activity that could be linked to consciousness. It did help
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: us learn that cellular activity does not immediately cease after
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: death and can be replenished or revived to some small
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: degree under very particular conditions. Right, so, like we are
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: like on the cusp of going, Hey, the minute that
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: you die doesn't mean that all of your cells stop
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: working right then, and there we know a little bit
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: more that like, yeah, there's a little bit of continued
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: activity past that point of when somebody is pronounced dead.
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they break down slowly over time, but a lot
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: of the primary functionality is gone. And you know, I
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: like to think about the sort of analogical comparison to
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: something like when you have the flu and your body
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: temperature actually gets really really high that can literally cook
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: your neurons. Yeah, and a lot of I think doctors
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: have compared this to cooking an egg, and it's like
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: once they're cooked and like the proteins are like are
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: untangled and retangled together in new ways. There's no undoing
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: that you cannot uncook an egg. So like once the mechanism,
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: the sort of biological pieces that are required for brain
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: to function start to break down, there's really no putting
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: them back together. They're they're broken. Now they're onto the
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: new stage of matter, which is decayed matter. Yeah, and
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: that's that's where our FK junior is now. It's it's
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: no longer functioning material. It's just decayed matter up there.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Just decayed matter. And I think this is actually a
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: really important point because we're talking about like brain cells
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: in like the features of specific brain cells and all that,
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: but also nerve cells and like how nerve cells actually operate,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: which gets us to the next point here.
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so regarding reattaching the nerve system. So we already
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: have the problem of the brain and like I guess
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: and versions of this, it's sort of been reanimated, although
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: not completely. You've got to attach that to something. A
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: brain without sensory input or any motors to coordinate does
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: literally nothing right. It's like the brain the jar. Yeah,
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: it's a place where all the things are connected, but
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: nothing's connected to anything else. It's just a bundle. It's
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: like that when you put a bunch of charge cords
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: in your bag and you pull them out and they're
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: just all wound together. They're not charging anything. Yeah, they're
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: just all in a big bundle. They're a big knot.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all chords, no dongles.
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: So anyway, nerve cells are some of the most difficult
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: to treat because they don't repair themselves like other selves.
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: And an additional challenge face with a full brain transplant
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: is also this issue of rejection as you were talking about,
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: and nervous cells are critical for acceptance of a new organ.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: If the primary driver for the central nervous system is
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: rejected by its own system, then you have a pretty
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: unique problem. Now, does this mean will never crack the code?
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: Not necessary, But there we certainly were. We weren't there now,
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: and we certainly weren't there in eighteen eighteen, over two
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: centuries ago.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: Right, And for those of you who are listening and
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: going like, well, you know, they're creating different things where
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: we can bypass certain nerve systems and stuff like that. Sure,
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: like there are things that are happening that we are
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: using electricity to like help move prosthetics and things like that,
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: but we're really not at the stage where we can
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: reattach nerve cells and like make them operate the same
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: way that they could before, not consistently at least, And
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: so that's I think critically important. Now let's talk about
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: the psychology part of this, because we are a psychology podcast,
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: and there is a really interesting discussion about nature versus
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: nurture given the issue that Victor abandoned his creature and
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: the creature faced innumerable rejections throughout its entire lifespan, which
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: was very short, true, right, So so throughout the book
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: you see that like this thing only wants love, and
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: it's constantly rejected, constantly punished, constantly called a freak, constantly
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: called these things like these names, and like people are
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: afraid of it. So you can kind of make this
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: argument to like, oh, yeah, this person's experience is pretty terrible,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: so you could see how they would learn to kind
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: of maybe engage in some more abbarent behaviors, you know.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: I think there's a question that comes up is like
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: would the creature have killed had it felt more love
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: or had companionship? And I don't know that's a fair
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: question because people kind of have all these unique learning
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: histories and whatnot. But we do know that the creature
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: was born with certain behaviors and that it learned throughout
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: the story. So it sounds like a little bit of nature,
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: a little bit of nurture, kind of like what we
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: understand of science today and human behavior, so it's bound
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: to kind of gain skills. I mean, it learned language,
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: which is learned behavior, but it feels pain, which it
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: was born with. So it's a little bit of both.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: And I think that when we talk about those things,
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: we know that it's like human behavior and creature behavior
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: in general is a combination of nature and nurture.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: I've gotten this question before when teaching undergrad psychology, and
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: I think it's a great question. It's sort of like,
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: are there people out there who would have become serial killers?
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: But they never they didn't grow up an environment that
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: resulted in those behaviors. If you take terrible people throughout history,
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: like let's just say Hitler, if Hitler had been raised
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: and in some environment that was that taught compassion and
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: respect for all religions and nationalities and faiths and skin
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: colors and was empathetic, like, would he have turned out
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: to be the horrible genocidal maniac that he that he
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: turned out to be? And I think that we would, generally,
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: with our philosophy of life, understand that they almost certainly
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: would have turned out different. At the very least their
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: paths would have taken some like somewhat to different outcomes.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: Whether or not it was drastically different, we don't know.
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: Like who they would have ultimately been would have been
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: at least somewhat different. And it's very reasonable to think, like,
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: and the answer I've given to that question of like,
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: are there are serial killers people that could have had
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: normal lives? Like could Alex Jones have turned out to
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: be a good person if he had been raised the
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: right way? And I think that, like optimistically and with
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: the philosophy and understanding of the in's a behavior that
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: I have, I think the answer is yes, Like, if
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: you have an appropriate environment that supports the development of
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: appropriate behaviors, you would get those people like they would
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: have turned out to be different people like Trump could
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: have been a different person, Like could have been a
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: good person. RFK Junior could have been a good person.
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: I mean, now his brain is a reanimated scrambled egg,
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: but like he could have been a good person before
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: that happened. Yeah, And so yeah, I think that that
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: it's reasonable concluded that could have been the case. But yeah,
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: we ultimately will never know because it's it's like that
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: isn't what happened. All we have is what did actually happen?
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: Like it really was this this creature that would just
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: faced so much constant punishment and extinction and so little
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: compassion or opportunity to thrive. And it's like anybody else
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: in that situation would also turn out to be like
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: just a horrible, terrible jd vance or something. Yeah, exactly,
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: We've seen it happen time. You know, there's one as
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: vice president right now, so yeah, or a Ron DeSantis
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: or a Greg Gabbott, like any one of those terrible
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: people who say life and like is clearly a monstrosity
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: that was designed by an environment that creates monstrosities. Yeah,
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: So anyway, that's.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: All that, that's the science of that.
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, But how would someone react if they woke up
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: from a brain transplant, since technically a brain transplant would
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: also be considered a body transplant based on the current
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: belief that the identity of a person is in the brain,
• 42:23
  Speaker 2: then it would be like waking up in a different body. Probably,
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: we don't, you know, we don't fully know. Yeah, great, Yeah,
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: but there would be related adjustments from simple things like
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: high orientation and more complex things like not recognizing your
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: own face or new sensations.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: You'll likely have different sensory inputs.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: And like it's actually not unrelated to another topic we're
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: going to be doing for our final Halloween episode, which
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: is Halloween Masks. Yeah, and how we think and behave
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: differently when we're wearing a mask. And it's somewhat spoiler alert,
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: but like think about the fact that, like that changes
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: how you interact with the world. So if you're wearing
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: a completely different body, that's also going to change how
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: you interact with the world and how the world reacts
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: to you. Yeah, And so I think it's reasonable consider that, like,
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: while you might retain some of the physical things that
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: made up you, your experience is going to be pretty
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: much very different right from the get.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: Go, Right, and at the end of the day, we
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: just don't know, Like we don't know because we've just
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: never that's uncharted territory. Like we can assume based on
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: what we understand of like how we perceive the world,
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: how we might react in a new body, but we
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: just don't know and we're really not even that close
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: to it. I mean the closest I could see would
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: be like maybe something like virtual reality, but like that's
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: not quite the same because you're it's just a new
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: environment with new like something that you're kind of observing
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: with still the same sensations of the body that you're in,
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: right like you are absorbing that information through your current
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: body that you have grown up in. So I do
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: think that we just don't know what that's going to be,
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: what that's going to be like, and I don't I
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: think that we can make some get but we'll never
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: know until we start exploring that and really doing the
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: science behind it.
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: Assume that's like a mantle anyone wants to pick up
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: and try and run with, you know, right, like, this
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: may not be an area that receives very much funding
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: your attention because it's it is a tough sell, I think,
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: but you know, thinking about like Futurama, there are going
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: to be people who are like I'm okay with being
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: ahead in a jar, like sure, let's uh yeah, keep
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: me keep me going, I'll just keep doing this thing forever.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, or or you have experiences like if you know,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: people like an avatar where it's like okay, so like
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: you know, you could kind of talk about, like, you know,
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: the utility of something like this, like you could see,
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: you know, just like from the optimistic standpoint, like this
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: could help resolve a lot of things if we're able
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: to get to this point. But we're not close. We're
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: not close to like transferring consciousness into other bodies or
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: into computers. We're not at the level of transferring into
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: you know, like we're just not there yet. We still
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: can't repair the nervous system, let alone take an entire
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: person's like awareness of put it in a different vessel. Like,
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: we're just not there.
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: It's true, but I think you've talked me into the
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: fact that maybe there's enough of a market for it
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: that people might be actively working on that problem. So
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: here's an advertisement for transferring your consciousness into a potato.
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: All right, We do have some more interesting tidbits for
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: you about the story. So again, in case we got
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: so far off track that you forgot what we were
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: talking about. We're talking about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the story
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: of reanimating a corpse. That's just a tragic tale and
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: many people will have asked the question, well, but what
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: about igor or igor depending on what persuasion you are from?
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: And anyway, this was totally a made up addition. It
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: was added to media representations of Frankenstein and didn't show
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: up until the nineteen thirty nine movie Son of Frankenstein
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: and other adaptations. The assistant was named Fritz instead. In
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: the story, there is no assistant. Frankenstein acts alone, which
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: is actually kind of important to the story because Frankenstein
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: is alone in his inner turmoil at fretting over the
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: problems wrought by his creation.
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's kind of walking around internally going home. Man,
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: oh man, what am I gonna do?
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, it's like legitimately a good chunk of the story.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: He's just like, oh yeah, so terrible.
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: He's like, I just laid there sick for months, so
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: just so worried about this.
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's great now, Frankenstein. The story
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: actually has an anti death penalty commentary, and it is
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: used as an example against the death penalty in general.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: Right here's how so specifically, they there's a storyline where
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: somebody is framed for a murder and put to death
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: as a result of this, it's Frankenstein's creature, by the way,
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: is the thing that murdered something somebody else. And then
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: so the monster kills somebody and then framed somebody else,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: and that person who was framed it's put to death
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: and then it's discovered later that the person is innocent,
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: and so there is like that kind of like anti
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: death penalty metaphor there, but there's also an adam metaphor
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: here as quote unquote God Frankenstein creates the first man
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: in the creature, so like there's kind of like there's
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: a lot of like religious allegory and stuff like that too,
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: which is really powerful.
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then like man has the sort of the
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: the opportunity for good and then commit sin and then
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: the sort of like in just the evil trajectory at
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: that point. So yeah, it is clever in the way
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: that she wrote that, And yeah, I think it is
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: really abundantly clear the tragedy of losing the sort of
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: childhood friend who is framed for murder of his brother
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: and then only to find out that that person and
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: you're thinking the whole time, well, if you had just
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: not put that person to death, like if the guilt
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: of the person was in question pretty much the entire time,
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: and then they coerce a confession, and of course a
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: coerced confession at that time, and I mean even still,
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: but definitely at that time was considered like, well, no
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: one's gonna lie about this, that's definitely right, right. And
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: speaking of which, we did an episode on false confessions.
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: You can go back and check out.
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: Anyway, they co es your confession, and so this person's
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: put to death, and like, if this person had just
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: been like put in jail, they would have been exonerated. Yeah,
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: but no, the knee jerk reaction is like, we've decided
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: on death. That's happening tomorrow, and like this very expedient
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: process of what I would call mob justice in this
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: particular case. But anyway, in the original novel, the creature
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: is vegetarian. Interestingly, despite eventually murdering some people, this creature
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: pretty much only eats berries that they find in the woods.
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: And so there's practical reasons, but there's also some ethical reasons.
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: The creature is actually kind of frightened by and disgusted
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: by violence and death that is, from hunting or even
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: slaughtering animals, and so it refrains from eating, like seeking
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: that out as a source of food.
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty reasonable about it. It's like the berries
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: and the things that I find will give me somethingance.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: This works in that. This is plenty yeah, yeah, and
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: that's kind of cool. The story is very popular. I mean,
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: if you are listening to this and you have never
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: read the book, you know who Frankenstein's moss is. You
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: know what he looks like. Oftentimes people think of the
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: universal monster, which is the porest carlisle one, the green head,
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: the flat top, the stitches across the forehead and the
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: neck of the bolts on the neck and all that. Yeah,
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: the thing is like that's the most popular. But there
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: are over four hundred feature films. There's four hundred and
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: thirty to date as of September. Easy number that we
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: know about. Four hundred and thirty five feature films, one
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: hundred and thirty ninety I'm sorry, one hundred and ninety
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: three short films, and three hundred and thirty two TV
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: series that share some version of the creature. But the
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: first film adaptation was almost one hundred years after the
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: book was written, and it was a short film in
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: nineteen ten and.
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: Of course, part of the reason we were inspired to
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: be talking about that is because just a short time
• 49:43
  Speaker 2: from the release of this episode, Gillermo del Toro was
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: releasing his treatise on Frankenstein, Yeah, which looks absolutely incredible.
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: I have tremendous respect for Guillermo del Toro as a
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: as a writer, a director, and a producer, and I
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: am very optimistic this movie is going to be possibly
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: the definitive Frankenstein story. I'm not sure how close it's
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: going to be to the original story, but I think
• 50:07
  Speaker 2: it's going to be closer than most modern tellings have been.
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: So I'm very excited to see how it goes. But
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: the another thing you'll see in reading the book is
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: that the original monster as written was not green. Frankenstein
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: is frequently depicted in green, but instead if you think
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: about sort of a old flesh, it actually is much
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: particularly if it's from like a Caucasian persuasion, it's yellow.
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: And so the monsters described as having sort of yellowish
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: skin with long flowing black hair, and these just perfect
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: chick lit like teeth that she didn't call them chicklets
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: because that was nothing back then, but just these perfect teeth.
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: So yeah, it was kind of a it was a
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: pretty different description, not like so different, like it was
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: still described as very tall and like coupled together from
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: very bit like the monsters, very frightening to people. And
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: that's why they react to him in the way that
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: they do. It's because he looks like a corpse brought
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: to life, like discolored and its eyes are yellow and
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: all that. But but for some reason it just became
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: depicted as green and most common popular representations.
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and depicted as green and also depicted as like
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: non like just not talking. In many of the other descriptions.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: They use an abnormal brain. That's what they do, like
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: instead of like you know what they do in the book,
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: which is just like they get all the best parts
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: over two years. So like I think it's like I
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: think there is like an it's an interesting depiction, you know,
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: to make him more of a I guess, more of
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: a monster than like a human. That's just kind of like,
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: hey man, life sucks, you know, yeah, absolutely absolutely all right.
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: But I think that is what I have to say
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I think this is uh I
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: as I said, I think this is one of my
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: favorite horror stories, like horror books. I think it's incredibly
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: well written. It's a strong recommend. If you haven't checked
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: it out, you can probably find it for like free
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: e books or like extremely cheap but used bookstores, or
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: even extremely cheap and like rey bookstores. You can go
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: pick one out, Like the copies are probably only going
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: to be like five or six dollars because seriously, it's
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: well outside of copy like intellectual copyright at this point.
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: But it is an amazing well written, beautiful story. It's tragic,
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: it's haunting. It's not very long, like it says, this
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: is only a couple hundred pages. I think, yeah, And
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: I think you could read it and just you know,
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: if you really wanted to on a weekend pretty easily, yeah,
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: or over the course of a week. But yeah, just
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: a really good story.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite books I've ever read. Like
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: it truly is like I generally avoid some classics because
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: sometimes they're like I don't really like the way that
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: it's written, Like I liked Dracula, but I didn't love
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: Dracula because it's written in a different format. But like
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: Frankenstein is truly it's a quick read. It's a beautiful read.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: It keeps you on your toes and it's just it's
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: truly one of the best books I've ever read. It is.
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really incredible. So all right, I think that's
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: what I have to say about that. If you would
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: like to support our podcast doing our thing, then you
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: should join us over on Patreon. If you do that,
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: you'll get ad free content, bonus content, early content, all
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: that kind of thing, and possibly the moment more importantly,
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: at the end of our full length discussions, I give
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: an active shout out thank you to all of the
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: people who help us be a podcast. So thank you
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: so much to Mike, Mmegan, Mike t, Justin, Kim Brad, Stephanie, Brian, Ashley,
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: Kiara and Charlie. Thank you for continuing to help us
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: be a show. We really really appreciate it and it
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: really helps us continue to do this things seriously. And yeah,
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: it's it is not free to make this podcast. We
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: have to pay for a bunch of stuff, so their
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: generosity helps us do that. And you could you could
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: join that list too, and I will also read your
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: name if you'd like to tell us your thoughts about
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: the Mary Shelley's Frankenstein add any more interesting tidbits or
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: correct something that we got wrong. We love hearing from people.
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: We're also very good with heaping amounts of praise. You
• 53:46
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• 53:51
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• 53:54
  Speaker 2: and of course telling a friend. Word of mouth is
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: a really important way that we spread podcasts around and
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: all that stuff helps us out. And we're also on
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: the social media platforms you can reach us. There those
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: kind of a mix of like how to reach us
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: and how to support us, but they're related. Yeah, they're there.
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we love all of it. Yeah.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you so much to my team of people
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: without whom I could not make this show writing and
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: fact checking from Shane and myself. Thank you so much
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: for recording with me today and for putting together the
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: notes on this topic.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: Shane, Hey, anytime. This was a fun one.
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: It really was. Our social media coordinator is Emma Wilson,
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: and our audio engineer producer who makes these podcasts listenable
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: and good is Justin who does a lot of hard
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: work and we make his job too difficult, but he's
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: really really good at what it does.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: We do. I feel so bad for Justin because of
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: our nonsense.
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, but we're actually not done yet. We like to
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: recommend things. Do you have anything to add before we
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: get to our recommendations?
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: No, I do not.
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: Did you notice I said the word add?
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: I did boo?
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: All right, Well, back from that ad break, and we're
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: gonna cue the music for some recommendations.
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: Yay, recommendations. I'm gonna go first.
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: I've been recommending a bunch of books and I'm just
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: gonna do that thing again. I just finished another book
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: that I was reading. This is a book called war
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: Breaker by Brandon Sanderson. This is sort of an earlier
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: book in his canon and his entry here. This does
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: fall into what is called the Cosmere. So sort of
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: like Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson writes these novels that all
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: sort of participate in the same universe. They're interconnected in
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: some way, and like you can read it and not
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: know anything about that universe and totally follow the story,
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: but if you read other books, you'll sort of see
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: little pieces that tie them all together. Yeah, and there's
• 55:55
  Speaker 2: like a bigger story that contains them. In Stephen King's
• 55:59
  Speaker 2: uni verse that's the Dark Tower, but in Brandon Sanderson
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: it is this god called atyl Nauseum and the Cosmer
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: where you have there are a couple characters who will
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: show up across these different stories, sure, and then these
• 56:13
  Speaker 2: other like godlike characters that are a breakoff of that
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: original big god thing. So anyway, war Breaker is a
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: really fun story. It is I wonder how to describe this.
• 56:27
  Speaker 2: It is a fantasy story set in a world where
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: people can take other people's breath and use that breath
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: to animate things to do work for them. They can
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: animate in animate objects like cloth, a rope. They can
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: also reanimate corpses, which is relevant to our story today
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: and turn them into soldiers. And they can reanimate pretty
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: much anything that has solid material. So that's part of it.
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: But the more breath you take from other living people
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: and beings and creatures, the more powerful you are, and
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: you essentially can reach like a like status. As a
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: matter of fact, people who die heroically will return as
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: like these these revenant gods that are sustained through crazy
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: amounts of breath. Sure, and the whole book is sort
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: of a lead up to sort of a war between
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: these two nations and just a lot of really cool
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: character development. So it's a really fun fantasy story. As
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: I said, it sort of exists in that cosmeir realm.
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: But I really enjoyed it, and I recommend people who
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: are interested in checking out Brandon Sanderson. It's actually a
• 57:27
  Speaker 2: really good starting point. This might be a place where
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: you want to jump in because it's earlier in the series,
• 57:32
  Speaker 2: Like a lot of the established lore isn't really something
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: you would need to know to be able to follow
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: this story. Yeah, and if you did want to read
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: more Cosmeer books, more of the characters from this story
• 57:42
  Speaker 2: are in those, and those characters and those other stories
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: are not in this because this one's early, So if
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: you were going to check it out, this is a
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: good place to start.
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: Cool. I love it. I love it. You know you
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: always bring up Brandon Sanderson. I still have not found
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: like an entry point. I think Wheel of Time is
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: the one that everybody talks so, like, I need that's
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: I think that's going to be like my entry to
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: his world.
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: But well, and that that wasn't his he uh, that
• 58:07
  Speaker 2: was started by Robert Jordan, but Robert Jordan passed away
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: he finished. Yeah, and so Brandon Sanderson helped write the
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: end of that stories. That is one of the things
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: that launched him into like major awareness and sort of
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: fantasy reader realm. And I love that series tremendously. It's
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: probably my favorite series, but it's not actually part of
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: any of like Brandon Sanders, that's universe.
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah sure, okay, okay, I got you, I got you? Cool?
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: All right? So he brought up Stephen King. So and
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: it is spooky season, so that's perfect. And I went
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: and saw a movie yesterday that is based on Stephen
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: king book called The Long Walk.
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: Oh this looks good.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: Oh my lord. So here's the thing about Stephen King
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: that I don't think people realize. There's two things. One
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: people just don't realize that Stephen King will take some
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: random idea and write an entire story about it, like
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: Everything's Eventual, as an example of a short story that
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: he wrote, and I want to kind of like, I'm
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: this is gonna take me a minute to lands, okay,
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: so just bear with me. So Everything's Eventual is about it,
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: like is written about a story where Stephen King saw
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: a man just dumping change into a sewer. Green Okay,
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: he saw some guy doing that, and he was like,
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: under what conditions would somebody do that? And then he
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: wrote a whole story saying that this guy was doing
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: it because he was contracted by a government agency because
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: of his psychic powers. His psychic powers can be that
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: he writes a symbol on something and that symbol does
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: whatever it is, and he was being used to assassinate people.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: He was given a certain allowance and he couldn't keep
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: the allowance for the next week. So what he would
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: do is he would take whatever leftover change he had
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: at the end of the week and he would dump
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: it into the drain. That's that's how Stephen King weave
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: the story around this, right.
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: Well, what an elaborate way to like think through that.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: Right. So the reason I say that is because when
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: you hear about the Long Walk, it is basically it
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: sounds like this. It's a competition where people walk and
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: if you stop walking, you die, And that is the
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: co of the story, except that it's based in a
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: world where it's like a major capitalist world where the
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: walk is like a symbolic thing that increases productivity and
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: fights laziness. But it is people dying along the way,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: and that's the story the whole movie is they start
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: walking and they do not stop. There can only be
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: one winner in this competition, and what is beautiful. But
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: it sounds like if for some people would be like
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: that sounds like a boring movie. It is beautiful. It
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: is all about like it's a joke of like, it's
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: not about the walk, it's the friends we made along
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: the way. And that's truly what it is. It's like
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: people connecting as humans along this walk, Like they're connecting
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: as people. They're joking with each other, they're trying to
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: support each other and how humanity always kind of rises
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: to the occasion when things are tough, like it is
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: really truly a beautiful bit of work. Now, the cast
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: is really interesting. Mark Hamill is the major he's the
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: villain in this, which is great. Whoa because Mark Hamill
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: was yeah yeah. But the rest of the cast is
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: a bunch of kind of like newer actors. Cool. There's
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: Cooper Hoffman, who is Philip Seymour Hoffman's son, which is
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: he's he's great and it he's the main character. David
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: Johnson he played the android in Alien Romulus. Oh okay,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: and he is really good. He is the best thing
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: about this whole movie. He is just incredible the entire time.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: And there's just a bunch of people that are in
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: it that are just really really good, like kind of
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: like up and coming actors, lots of representation, which is
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: cool too, and just it answers all of the practical
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: things that you would think would happen along the walk,
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: like how does somebody use the restroom? Answers that question
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: pretty easily. What happens when people start getting delirious and
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: dehydrated or they're sick? That Like, it answers every single
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: question you could think of about the logistics of a
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: long walk like this, Wow, and it's just sleep deprivation.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: What do we do? Okay, there's a whole thing for
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: that too. So it's incredible. Strong recommend to go read it.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: And it's perfect for spooky season because it's like violent
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: and thriller but not too scary like and it's super accessible.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: It's really really good.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: Wow. All right, I was curious about this one that
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: that was a really intense sell, so I'm interested to
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: check it out.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: So again, that is a war Breaker a book novel
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 2: by Brandon Sanderson, and The Long Walk a new movie
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 2: that is based off of us Stephen King's story, so
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: if you want to check those out. But of course
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 2: there's also Frankenstein, which is just a really good book
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: which we recommend. So yes, I think that is all
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: we have to say, Thank you so much for listening.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: Anything else you want to add, Nope, that's it all right.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: Then this is Abraham and this is Shane. We're out.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: See it. You've been listening to Why We Do What
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: We Do.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 2: You can learn more about this and other episodes by
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: going to WWD WWD.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: Podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: have an awesome day.