Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail.
Speaker 2: My name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day
Speaker 3: of each week that we read back messages from the
Speaker 3: Stuff to Blow your Mind email address. If you're a
Speaker 3: listener of the show and you've never gotten in touch before,
Speaker 3: why not give it a try. You can email us
Speaker 3: at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3: We like all kinds of messages, especially if you have
Speaker 3: feedback or something really interesting to add to a recent
Speaker 3: episode of the show. Whatever you want to send, it's
Speaker 3: all fair game. Contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com. Let's see rob Oh, we've got a good
Speaker 3: message to start things off today. That's say response to
Speaker 3: one of your Monster Fact episodes. You want to do
Speaker 3: this one from Constantinos?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Konstantinos writes in and says, good morning gents. On
Speaker 2: your Monster Fact episode on the Hecatonkures, you mentioned the
Speaker 2: artistic renditions of the Hecatonkures were hard to find, probably
Speaker 2: because the Hecatonkures, they multi headed, multi limbed giant, is
Speaker 2: such a weird and difficult creature to render. For those
Speaker 2: of you out there, if you didn't listen to this
Speaker 2: episode and and or are not familiar with this creature,
Speaker 2: these were monsters that were created by Urunos along with
Speaker 2: the Cyclopses, that were too horrible to look upon, so
Speaker 2: they were cast away and imprisoned. Then Kronos comes to power,
Speaker 2: he didn't really want anything to do with them either.
Speaker 2: But when Zeus comes to power, he sees that they
Speaker 2: have potential and he recruits, frees them, and recruits them
Speaker 2: into his battle against the Titans. And they are briefly
Speaker 2: described in very weird terms as having like fifty heads
Speaker 2: and in all these arms one hundred hand ends. And
Speaker 2: my comment was that, yeah, you don't see many illustrations
Speaker 2: of these guys, or at least you don't see many
Speaker 2: older illustrations of them. If you look around for image
Speaker 2: of the images of them, you'll tend to find more
Speaker 2: contemporary images of the Hecatonkrease, you know, things from the
Speaker 2: age of surrealism and cosmic horror.
Speaker 3: You know, I feel like once you get more than
Speaker 3: three or four of anything on a monster, it starts
Speaker 3: getting kind of redundant and just hard to represent or
Speaker 3: less appealing to represent. I think there's a similar problem
Speaker 3: with that. There is some wild imagery in the Book
Speaker 3: of Revelation, in the New Testament that you just don't
Speaker 3: often see visually represented that much, and I think it's
Speaker 3: because they've got they're described as having too many things there,
Speaker 3: these creatures with like seven heads and seven wings and
Speaker 3: seven crowns. You know, it's like seven is too many.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's interesting when you look at
Speaker 2: you know, multi headed beings and say Hindu iconography, where
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes it'd be it's rather ingenious the way
Speaker 2: that they're there's they sometimes will make even say an
Speaker 2: odd number of heads fit on a particular entity, because
Speaker 2: you know, it's like hard coded, it's essential, it's sacred
Speaker 2: that it is a certain number of heads. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I was, I was. I kept crunching over this thinking,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, why don't we see more illustrations
Speaker 2: of these clearly fascinating creatures from myth And you know,
Speaker 2: you think to a lot of through a lot of
Speaker 2: art history, and there's this, you know, attempt to create
Speaker 2: realistic bodies, be they animal bodies, human bodies, or some
Speaker 2: synthesis of the two. But something like even something as
Speaker 2: simple as say Goro from Mortal Kombat, there there are
Speaker 2: certain problems in illustrating this creature because when you start
Speaker 2: trying to figure out what the like what's the underlying skeleton,
Speaker 2: like how does the muscle structure work? And it becomes
Speaker 2: increasingly difficult I would imagine to incorporate actual physiological data
Speaker 2: into a realistic depiction of said monster. And that's just
Speaker 2: with with two extra arms. I'll imagine with ninety eight
Speaker 2: of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you tried to draw a Goro skeleton, I imagine
Speaker 3: you would. You might discover that you had an illusion
Speaker 3: of explanatory depth there, like it seemed like it made
Speaker 3: sense to you until you had to figure out where
Speaker 3: all the bones go, and then you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: this isn't how skeletons work.
Speaker 2: There was a great paper publically looked at on the
Speaker 2: show years ago. I'd have to have to dig this up,
Speaker 2: but somebody had put together a paper about how a
Speaker 2: centaur might work, trying to figure out like how the
Speaker 2: circulatory system would work, and I think I think they
Speaker 2: One of the things that they argued is like, Okay,
Speaker 2: you're going to need two hearts to run this thing
Speaker 2: and so forth. So it's an interesting exercise at times
Speaker 2: as well, but maybe it's a little more interesting when
Speaker 2: there are fewer variables to have to consider.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I actually did just google Goro skeleton and it's
Speaker 3: real funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, some of the later games they incorporate
Speaker 2: a Goro skeleton in there because there's all sorts of
Speaker 2: you know, fatalities and whatnot that occurs where you see
Speaker 2: the skeleton and it always looks really dumb, like it's like, oh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this wasn't thought out too much. Anyway, The email continues
Speaker 2: here back when Disney made fun movies. I think that's
Speaker 2: a matter of opinion. I think Disney still makes some
Speaker 2: fun news. I watched the animated Hercules once worked over
Speaker 2: twelve hundred times with my kids. In the opening musical number,
Speaker 2: The Gospel Truth, there is a heavily stylized rendering of
Speaker 2: the Titano Maki the War with the Titans. Among the
Speaker 2: Titans silhouettes, there is a stylized two headed giant that
Speaker 2: I always thought was a simplified image of one of
Speaker 2: the Hecatonkreas. The movie is actually subtly quite sophisticated in
Speaker 2: his portrayal of Greek mythology, and I do think the
Speaker 2: image here was intentional. It is also contextually consistent with
Speaker 2: the theme. I don't think that there is any other
Speaker 2: polycephalic monster that participated in the Tautana monkey that could
Speaker 2: have inspired this image. So there you go, a modern
Speaker 2: Hecatonkari hiding in plain sight in American pop culture. And
Speaker 2: he included an image from this so we didn't have
Speaker 2: to actually pull up the movie and start watching it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we see a creature with two heads in this styling,
Speaker 2: normal number of limbs. It's monstrous. Yeah, I can only
Speaker 2: imagine that this was inspired by these creatures, though clearly
Speaker 2: if they had worked out any additional limbs or heads,
Speaker 2: they left that on the cutting room floor.
Speaker 3: It's been a long time since I saw the Disney Hercules,
Speaker 3: but I remember it actually having a pretty seeming to
Speaker 3: have a pretty clever incorporation of the real Greek myth themes.
Speaker 2: I don't know that I've ever seen it. I think
Speaker 2: my son watched it once and he was too pick
Speaker 2: He was like, this is not accurate, this is not
Speaker 2: mythologically sound, and so you know, if he's not into it,
Speaker 2: I was certainly not going to go out and watch it,
Speaker 2: but I don't know. You know a lot of plenty
Speaker 2: of people grew up with this movie and it's got
Speaker 2: a pretty deep cast. I mean, you have ripped torn
Speaker 2: as Zeus. How you go wrong with that?
Speaker 3: Cannot beat that? That is perfect the Man who Fell
Speaker 3: to Earth.
Speaker 2: Indeed, anyway, thank you for writing in that Monster Fact episode.
Speaker 2: I did put a call out. It's like, if you
Speaker 2: were familiar with any additional images of the Hecatonkaris, especially
Speaker 2: ones from throughout art history, you know, much older images
Speaker 2: right in because I would love to be corrected on this.
Speaker 2: I would love for someone to point out, actually, you're
Speaker 2: missing some key images from ancient Greece or ancient Rome
Speaker 2: or or medieval iconography. You know. I would love to
Speaker 2: see that if it exists, but I just can't couldn't
Speaker 2: find it anywhere.
Speaker 3: M okay. Next message concern earns the uh oh the
Speaker 3: episode that I did while you were out rob about
Speaker 3: Ambergrease with our friends Annie and Lauren from the Saverer podcast.
Speaker 3: If you haven't heard that episode, yet, this was this
Speaker 3: is a couple weeks ago now, Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 3: But the episode was titled I believe a delicacy from
Speaker 3: realms of Insufferable Feater after a quote that is used
Speaker 3: in Moby Dick to describe where the Ambergrease comes from.
Speaker 3: So this message is from our h all Right, says,
Speaker 3: enjoying the Ambergresse episode. Well listening, I recalled where I
Speaker 3: first learned about Ambergrease, in the eighth volume of Donald
Speaker 3: Soball's Encyclopedia Brown series. You know, I had awareness of
Speaker 3: these books when I was a kid. Friends of mine
Speaker 3: read them, but I never actually read one, and I
Speaker 3: feel like I kind of missed out now.
Speaker 2: You know, I haven't thought about the name Encyclopedia Brown
Speaker 2: in a very long time. I don't think I ever
Speaker 2: read any of them. But yeah, like you, I remember
Speaker 2: seeing them being passed around. I remember it being in
Speaker 2: the mix.
Speaker 3: My impression was it was like Sherlock Holmes for kids
Speaker 3: or something. Anyway, so Rh continues, If memory serves, one
Speaker 3: of Brown's classmates found a mysterious blob of something and
Speaker 3: sought his encyclopedic encyclopedic mind. I guess Encyclopedia Brown's encyclopedic mind.
Speaker 3: I wonder if kids read these anymore? Dad, what's an Encyclopedia.
Speaker 3: These books were great encouragement for great schoolers to be
Speaker 3: syllogistic thinkers using deductive reasoning. I hope they are still
Speaker 3: in heavy demand at the old Scholastic Book Fair. Keep
Speaker 3: up the great work, rh PS. Repo Man would be
Speaker 3: a great weird house cinema candidate. Yeah, wow, I haven't
Speaker 3: seen Repo Man in a long long time, but I
Speaker 3: remember that one being very weird and very fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've never seen it actually, but it's come up
Speaker 2: on the show before just because of some of the
Speaker 2: connections that are press there. But yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 2: it has a strong cult following. It's it's definitely one
Speaker 2: that's been on the list.
Speaker 3: It's got Harry Dean Stanton. So that's that alone is
Speaker 3: going to get you part of the way there. Seal
Speaker 3: of quality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now on the Scholastic Book Fair questions in Encyclopedia Brown,
Speaker 2: I have reviewed materials from various Scholastic Book Fairs over
Speaker 2: the years here and I have to say I do
Speaker 2: not remember seeing Encyclopedia Brown on the list. I mean,
Speaker 2: kids these days have some amazing choices in books. Far,
Speaker 2: They're not having to read Stephen King like I did.
Speaker 2: You know. I mean I didn't just read Stephen King.
Speaker 2: I also had I had some age appropriate books that
Speaker 2: I read as well. But there are so many more
Speaker 2: age appropriate books covering all sorts of cool topics. I mean,
Speaker 2: just speaking of mythodology from earlier, Like, there's so many
Speaker 2: wonderful books based on various world mythologies out there, you know,
Speaker 2: fictional books that use mythology as the basis, And a
Speaker 2: lot of these are written by people whose heritage, whose
Speaker 2: country of origin lines up with said mythology. So it's
Speaker 2: you know, it's really cool.
Speaker 3: Mm yeah. I mean, I guess I will at some
Speaker 3: point soon become acquainted with what the kids are reading
Speaker 3: these days. But uh yeah, I don't know though. As
Speaker 3: I said, I like, I never read these books either.
Speaker 3: I am curious about what RH brings up, like a
Speaker 3: would kids today even still be acquainted with the idea
Speaker 3: of encyclopedia, like with the I don't know what's the
Speaker 3: equivalent concept now, it's just like Facebook misinformation Brown.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Wikipedia, Brown, That's that's what it would be.
Speaker 3: Misleading TikTok video Brown.
Speaker 1: M M.
Speaker 2: All right, This next one comes to us from Michael,
Speaker 2: and this is really in regard to our episode on
Speaker 2: the illusion of control. Hello again from Tasmania. I'm a
Speaker 2: bit late listening to this one, but I just wanted
Speaker 2: to let Rob know that there is nothing abnormal about
Speaker 2: clicking the button of your key fob three or more
Speaker 2: times to make sure your car locked properly. But if
Speaker 2: you can't quite hear the central locking mechanism or one
Speaker 2: of the doors slash or the boot is ajar. I
Speaker 2: am compelled to do mine at least three times before
Speaker 2: I walk away, and then maybe a couple of more
Speaker 2: times as I start to get out of range. Thank
Speaker 2: you for keeping the show running all this time. I
Speaker 2: have been listening for around ten years and would feel
Speaker 2: a little lost without the hundreds of conversations at work
Speaker 2: and home. Your podcast prompts me to have warm regards Michael.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Michael. This is a wonderfully mail to get
Speaker 3: about what's normal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, three is good. I feel a little guilty if
Speaker 2: I do five, but I've but three three feels appropriate.
Speaker 2: I'm a little antsy if I do less than three.
Speaker 3: What if five is not enough?
Speaker 2: Five is enough? I mean five again. They're deities in
Speaker 2: various traditions that have five heads. Five five.
Speaker 3: As a nice ring to it, you gotta click lock
Speaker 3: on your car once for each of the beasts seven heads,
Speaker 3: and then once for each of its ten horns. Okay,
Speaker 3: this next message comes from Robin. Robin says, Hi, Rob, Joe,
Speaker 3: and JJ. The recent listener mail talking about responses to
Speaker 3: the illusion of control episodes got me thinking down a
Speaker 3: related train of thought, illusion of control and magical thinking,
Speaker 3: perhaps being more of a nature of grade than of
Speaker 3: kind or contingent on a model of belief. As Joe
Speaker 3: was musing, brought up some concepts to illustrate. The following
Speaker 3: is a real life example. Perhaps we've all had this
Speaker 3: kind of experience, or perhaps it's just me. Say you're
Speaker 3: walking down the path late in the day and you
Speaker 3: notice strangely that overhead pedestrian lights seem to be turning
Speaker 3: on or flickering on and off as you come near them.
Speaker 3: This happens enough in a short span that you get
Speaker 3: that spooky magical thinking mode activated in your brain. Lights
Speaker 3: turning on around me. I am an electromagnetic god. Rationally,
Speaker 3: you know nothing spooky is happening, and whatever is happening,
Speaker 3: you simply don't understand it yet. As it happens. In
Speaker 3: this case, it was likely some sort of timed event,
Speaker 3: whether by internal clock software or perhaps light levels, that
Speaker 3: triggered multiple lights turning on around the same time. You know, Robin,
Speaker 3: I seemed to have vague memories years ago of something
Speaker 3: that was like street lights near my house that had
Speaker 3: some kind of that had some kind of daylight sensor,
Speaker 3: or something in my friend's car would make them turn
Speaker 3: off at night as he drove underneath them. I think
Speaker 3: it was like the way it reflected the light back
Speaker 3: or something. Robin goes on. An event like this and
Speaker 3: the resulting thoughts make me wonder if, even with no rational,
Speaker 3: thoughtful belief in magical thinking, it might be a kind
Speaker 3: of itch that's just nice to scratch once in a while,
Speaker 3: to almost pretend to yourself that you believe it. Like
Speaker 3: experiencing a good story, it just soothed something in our
Speaker 3: base makeup long since baked in by evolution and culture.
Speaker 3: Simply put, it feels good to engage in some magical thinking,
Speaker 3: even if you don't actually believe in it. Thank you,
Speaker 3: as ever for the work you put into the excellent
Speaker 3: content you deliver. Cheers Robin, Well, thank you, Robin. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I certainly think that's totally plausible. Maybe it's just there's
Speaker 3: some kind of itch, psychological itch that it scratches to
Speaker 3: imagine that you have, you know, extra normal powers that
Speaker 3: you you know, can affect things in ways beyond the
Speaker 3: causative mechanisms normally available to you. And if that's true,
Speaker 3: I guess one thing it makes me think about is like,
Speaker 3: why that would be like? For example, one reason I
Speaker 3: think it probably feels good to experience a fictional story
Speaker 3: like you were talking about in the email, is that
Speaker 3: a fictional story simulates real life situations of gaining useful information,
Speaker 3: such as gaining social information about acquaintances through gossip, or
Speaker 3: gaining information about how social situations, you know, difficult social
Speaker 3: situations play out, maybe gaining survival information from a story
Speaker 3: of someone overcoming adversity or danger. But of course, because
Speaker 3: the fictional story is fictional, it can be crafted to
Speaker 3: be like unrealistically juicy and rich with the most exciting
Speaker 3: and salient kinds of details that these real life narratives
Speaker 3: could ever contain, you know. And so if that's the case,
Speaker 3: and if magical thinking does in fact cause pleasure because
Speaker 3: it scratches some kind of similarly deep rooted itch. I
Speaker 3: wonder what that itch is like. Could it be something like,
Speaker 3: you know, the fact that encouraging you to think what
Speaker 3: you would do if you had more power than you
Speaker 3: actually have is useful because it it, you know, makes
Speaker 3: you think through things in a way that will will
Speaker 3: be useful pre planning if you actually do gain more
Speaker 3: realistic power than you have presently. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting to think about, and such fictions are
Speaker 2: always going to be popular. This all reminds me of
Speaker 2: a of a game that we will playfully do in
Speaker 2: the car when usually when it's just me and my son,
Speaker 2: where I guess you could call it turn green now,
Speaker 2: where we're at a stop light. We'll try and time
Speaker 2: it so that you know, when one of us goes,
Speaker 2: we'll sort of take turn saying turn green now, and
Speaker 2: then you know, we don't actually think we're turning the
Speaker 2: changing the light or anything. But it's kind of satisfying
Speaker 2: when you do occasionally hit it right on the nose
Speaker 2: and you're like, ah, I did it. My powers are unequaled.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's good. I mean, I guess that is
Speaker 3: actually someonet equivalent to being pleased with yourself. When you
Speaker 3: hit a good dice roll, it's like it wasn't actually
Speaker 3: skill but it feels like it. Oh, I don't know,
Speaker 3: now that I think about it, I guess the timing
Speaker 3: the green light probably is more skill based than a
Speaker 3: dice roll, right, it's not totally random. You're like getting
Speaker 3: a feel for how long it usually takes.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and you can also check out what the
Speaker 2: crosswalk signs are doing. You count If you can see
Speaker 2: the countdown, you can really cheap and then there's there's
Speaker 2: absolutely little luck involved. You can get it right down
Speaker 2: to the wire, but you don't always have those to
Speaker 2: go off of.
Speaker 3: That's a great point. But yeah, so your your turn
Speaker 3: green game is actually mostly skill based, I would say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right. This next one comes to us from Peter, Hi, Robert,
Speaker 2: and Joe. I found your episodes on the illusion of
Speaker 2: control most interesting. While I consider myself rational and scientifically minded,
Speaker 2: I have realized that I indeed have this bias to
Speaker 2: a degree, despite my understanding of odds and probability. When
Speaker 2: I play games, especially involving dice, I have a belief
Speaker 2: that I will be lucky. I often roll lucky in
Speaker 2: pressure situations. Of course, I have probably not paid as
Speaker 2: much attention to the unlucky roles. Yeah, this is, of course,
Speaker 2: of course, key.
Speaker 3: Remember the hits, forget the misses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I guess it depends on what
Speaker 2: kind of person you are. You know, if you focus
Speaker 2: more on the negatives, then yeah, you're gonna be like,
Speaker 2: something's wrong with this with these dice, or something's wrong
Speaker 2: with this random number generator in this video game or
Speaker 2: you know, phone game or what have it. And if
Speaker 2: you're the other way around, then yeah, you're gonna skew
Speaker 2: the other direction. Anyway, they continued. This all probably became
Speaker 2: reinforced with a childhood event. While playing board games with
Speaker 2: some friends, I made a challenge to roll one, two, three, four,
Speaker 2: five six in sequence while passing the die to different people.
Speaker 2: I began by calling out one and then proceeding to
Speaker 2: roll a one on a six sided die. I passed
Speaker 2: it to a friend, who called out two and rolled
Speaker 2: a two. The challenge continued so forth, and we actually
Speaker 2: rolled one, two, three, four, five six in sequence by
Speaker 2: different people. We did it on the first try. Now
Speaker 2: I understand that the different people didn't really affect the odds,
Speaker 2: but it blew us away. I calculated the odds, which
Speaker 2: came to point zero zero two one four percent, or
Speaker 2: one in forty six thousand, six hundred and fifty six.
Speaker 3: That sounds pretty cool, Peter.
Speaker 2: This experience, although founded on randomness and basic probability, at
Speaker 2: least subconsciously impacts my feelings, my feeling that I can
Speaker 2: roll lucky and call out dice rolls, although I reserve
Speaker 2: it for crucial situations. Note, I believe it only really
Speaker 2: works with physical dice rather than video game rng's or
Speaker 2: random number generators. I know it doesn't make rational sense,
Speaker 2: but I can't shake the belief that there may be
Speaker 2: something more to it, my weird tale of illusion of control.
Speaker 2: Cheers Peter.
Speaker 3: Well, thanks Peter. And yet this is great. I do
Speaker 3: think our minds work this way. And in fact, there
Speaker 3: was some research we talked about in the series exactly
Speaker 3: along these lines that like the research about the early
Speaker 3: success emphasis increasing our illusions of controls, Like if you
Speaker 3: have an early winning streak at some kind of game
Speaker 3: of chance, you are more inclined to think after that
Speaker 3: that you have control over a random process, and that
Speaker 3: seems to perhaps be operating with you. You had a really
Speaker 3: salient early lucky streak of roles, and as you say,
Speaker 3: it's like hard to shake the feeling that there's something
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 2: Now. The other possibility is that Peter is simply the
Speaker 2: chosen one.
Speaker 3: That's right, Yes, he did see the mouse in the
Speaker 3: second moon, and now the spice is guiding him. This
Speaker 3: is also just a great example of realizing how our
Speaker 3: intuitions can be misleading about the probability of events, because
Speaker 3: you take, even if we assume that Peter the numbers
Speaker 3: you give or write about this being an event that's
Speaker 3: like one in forty six, six hundred and fifty six
Speaker 3: chance of happening, you still you'd say, Okay, that seems
Speaker 3: very unlikely. But then you would have to multiply that
Speaker 3: by like the number of times in the world that
Speaker 3: people around the world try to do something like this,
Speaker 3: which I imagine, given all the time that people sit
Speaker 3: around playing with dice, is actually quite a lot. So like,
Speaker 3: given all of those chances to have hits, you will
Speaker 3: have stories like this where people have a very unlikely
Speaker 3: series of roles. Because people are just playing around with
Speaker 3: dice all the time, there are a lot of chances
Speaker 3: to make it happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean we often can We can think
Speaker 2: to those various runs we've had or our parties have
Speaker 2: had in Dungeons and Dragons where it's like like three
Speaker 2: twenties in a row, you know, three natural twenties, or
Speaker 2: or the other end of the spectrum, you know multiple
Speaker 2: natural ones, or multiple like you low scoring roles, And yeah,
Speaker 2: it's the extremes that stand out to us.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of roles in each game. There
Speaker 3: are a lot of people out there gaming. If you
Speaker 3: know a lot of people who do game, you probably
Speaker 3: know somebody who had at some point a really unlikely streak.
Speaker 2: Yeah I did, we mention. I don't know if we
Speaker 2: mentioned this before, but it always kind of I always
Speaker 2: get a little judge when I see someone at at
Speaker 2: a gaming table just rolling the dice over and over again,
Speaker 2: out of any necessity to do so, just to see
Speaker 2: what they get. Yea, because part of my irrational brain
Speaker 2: is like, like, you're using up your twenties. Man. You know,
Speaker 2: it's one thing if you're rolling ones on that, but
Speaker 2: I just just saw you roll like an eighteen. That's
Speaker 2: an eighteen you won't roll later because you just rolled
Speaker 2: it now. And that's silly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it also makes me think when I see
Speaker 3: somebody doing that at the table, I think, are you
Speaker 3: being opportunistic? Like you're just kind of rolling and then
Speaker 3: like you might try to claim that most recent role
Speaker 3: if it was good and your turn has come up.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean. I mean there are gaming
Speaker 2: systems where you get to like, you know, store dice
Speaker 2: rolls for later, but most D twenty games are not
Speaker 2: don't work like that. You know. Irrationality in the face
Speaker 2: of actual statistics is such an interesting concept and something
Speaker 2: I kept thinking about during this this that these episodes,
Speaker 2: and something that I think about too sometimes when when
Speaker 2: I'm dealing with anxious thoughts and I have to share
Speaker 2: this one bit that came up in my reading of
Speaker 2: the book Dead House Gates. This is book two of
Speaker 2: the malasone book of the Fallen by Steven Ericson. This
Speaker 2: is like, you know, a high fantasy adventure stuff. But
Speaker 2: there's one character who has a fear of tunnels. And
Speaker 2: there's just one little bit in the book goes as
Speaker 2: follows quote he hated tunnels. No, they terrified him. There
Speaker 2: was nothing rational in it. Wrong Again, tunnels collapse, people
Speaker 2: get buried alive, all perfectly reasonable, possible, probable, inevitable, And
Speaker 2: I just love this one little bit. It's like, yes,
Speaker 2: that is exactly the progression that your mind can go
Speaker 2: through when you're anxiously considering something like that, Like I
Speaker 2: shouldn't be worried about this, but wait, it has happened,
Speaker 2: can happen, could happen, will happen.
Speaker 3: Yes, It's so easy to jump from possible to probable
Speaker 3: and then yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 2: Before we close here, I want to throw out one
Speaker 2: quick note about Weird House Cinema. On Friday, we did
Speaker 2: part one of our look at David Lynch's nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: four adaptation of Doune, and this Friday, if everything goes
Speaker 2: according to plan, we'll be finishing that up with a
Speaker 2: part two where we look at the rest of that movie.
Speaker 2: And I just want to throw this out there. Hey,
Speaker 2: if you have any thoughts about David Lynch's Dune, about
Speaker 2: the New Dune films, and you want to write in
Speaker 2: and chat with us about it, you want to have
Speaker 2: it come up on the Listener Mail episodes, please do so,
Speaker 2: because we always have a lot of fun with this.
Speaker 2: In fact, we just had a coworker text us on
Speaker 2: a group text asking us how do they get off
Speaker 2: of the sandworms after they're done writing them? Good question,
Speaker 2: it's a great question. The short answer is you're supposed
Speaker 2: to write them to exhaustion and then you get off.
Speaker 2: But I love questions like this.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that answers it.
Speaker 2: There are additional follow up questions that are very valid.
Speaker 2: I mentioned this to my wife and she's like, well, what, yeah,
Speaker 2: what do you do if you're going a shorter distance?
Speaker 2: And I think the answer is you're supposed to time
Speaker 2: your distances appropriately, you know, based on the size of
Speaker 2: the worm you snag and so forth. But yeah, there
Speaker 2: are a number of follow up questions to this that
Speaker 2: are valid, and there are not necessarily answers for the sandworm.
Speaker 3: Is a is a train ride not an uber ride?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean you're you're attaching yourself to a force
Speaker 2: of nature. Uh when you you ride ride the sandworm?
Speaker 2: When you ride the worm? So uh, you know, strap in.
Speaker 3: I will, I will be sure to uh, I think so. Yeah,
Speaker 3: next week, I'm sure there will be lots of dune talk.
Speaker 3: Send in, send in your dune talk.
Speaker 2: All right. Just a reminder that we're primarily a science podcast,
Speaker 2: with our Tuesday and Thursday episodes being our core episodes,
Speaker 2: but Monday is our listener mail time. That's when we
Speaker 2: UH have a look through the mail bag and UH
Speaker 2: and respond to various messages from you the listener, so
Speaker 2: keep them coming. Uh listener mail regarding past episodes, current episodes,
Speaker 2: and potential future episodes of anything we put together.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuffdblow your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com.
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