Holiday Monsters & Listener Mail

Christmas is here again, so join Robert, Joe and Christian as they discuss a few holiday monsters and tend to your listener mail.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to bloy to Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, I'm John McCormick, and I'm
Christian Sager. Hey, so it is almost the new year. Uh.
This is our listener mail episode right before the Christmas holiday,

(00:26):
and we just want to remind you that we don't
just do the podcast, right guys, like we do a
lot throughout the week. We are on social media curating
all kinds of weird science e stuff. We're making videos,
we're writing articles for how stuff works. Sometimes the eating
thing I've been taking a little bit of a step
back from, but mainly so that I can post on Facebook,

(00:48):
Twitter and Tumbler and live blog Mascar events. Oh wait,
is that part of our contract? Yes, that's what we
do now, Okay, all right, I'll try to get on
top of that over the break. So, uh, if you
out there want to catch up on all this other
stuff that isn't the podcast, maybe you're just getting the
podcast feed right into your phone. That's what I do
with most of the podcasts I listened to. Don't forget
to hang out with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler

(01:11):
will blow the mind on all those channels, and be
sure to check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot
com because that is the mothership for this podcast. That's
where you'll find all the podcast episodes going all the
way back to the beginning of time. You'll find videos
who find a whole bunch of blog post cool listen
galleries that we put together. Uh, and the landing page
for each podcast episode is gonna have feature some links

(01:31):
out to related content both on and off the site.
And also if you're one of the wonderful little gang
who's been joining us every Friday at noon, you already
know this, but we also do Periscope. Periscope is a
how would you describe periscope, Christian It's a social media
platform that I believe Twitter owns that is live streaming video.
So literally we hang out here at the office, sit

(01:53):
in front of an iPad and we talked to I
think it's like we're up to like maybe about a
hundred people a session now, um, but it could always
be bigger. So yeah, if you want to ask us
questions live or or just come to chat heckle us
and have some fun, we tend to do that. Every
Friday at noon. We announced it on social media Eastern
Standard time, right, but we we may be erratic or

(02:17):
or absent the next couple of weeks over the holidays.
We're still trying to figure that out. You will let
you know through our social channels, because we're here in America.
We have a pretty crazy next couple of weeks with
Christmas coming up in the New Year holiday, and because
it is time, is there a time of stress and
it is a time of darkness and monsters. Yes, perfect segue, Robert. Yeah.

(02:40):
I mean, I don't know about you guys, but holiday
monsters there are something that I cling to more and more,
especially given here in America Christmas is in holidays. It's
just such a bombardment of of fake joy and enthusiasm
and high expectations of what your celebrations in family time

(03:01):
and in in situation and just emotional state are supposed
to amount to. And all of it is in rather
stark contrast to the reactable. First of all, just the
reality of living life in the real world, but even
traditional treatment of a season that is is typified by darkness,

(03:22):
the loss of light, the death of crops and and
frozen soil, I actually pitched a story here at work
the other day that I don't think we'll ever get
off the ground. That was, like, let's do a cost
benefit analysis as of the emotional well being of people
post Christmas, like like like, like, does all the stuff
that you put into it, right? Does that actually end
up as positive goodwill after all sudden done. I'm the

(03:47):
wrong person to ask. I'm kind of a grinch, but
I like, I'm not a grinch in the sense that like,
I'm like, I don't want to give gifts to anybody,
but I just I have this sort of cynical viewpoint
of the holidays, but I love given gifts and I
love even more Christmas monsters. Yeah, that's well. My wife
and I watch Rare Exports every Christmas. That is a wonderful,

(04:07):
wonderful movie. It's got, it's got everything you could want. Yeah, Christmas,
and I'm really happy to see this sort of resurgence
of Christmas themed horror movies. It's not just Halloween time
where we get some really good some really good horror movies. Well,
it's an old tradition that you had Gremlins in the eighties,
that's right. I always forget that was essentially a Christmas movie,

(04:28):
Black Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night. Oh. I think those
were pretty horrible, weren't they. Those always traumatized me seeing
that the posters as a child, because I remember as
a as a child, I loved Christmas and I had
I would I would really have like a childhood like
a fence that I would take at seeing those posters
or are certainly seeing one particular episode of Tales from

(04:50):
the Dark Side about the Grither. I think that the
episode is called Seasons of Belief, and it's just it's
not even a very good episode, but this has something
monstrous ending where the Gritter, which is kind of this
Grinch esque creature like, reaches its arms through the windows
and crushes the skulls of the children's parents because they,

(05:11):
you know, they weren't believing in Christmas enough. Now, do
you remember the episode of Tales from the Crypt that
has an axe murderer addressed as Santa. Yes, that was
a big theme. In a season of American Horror Story,
Shane shows up for like two episodes as a serial
killer who dresses up like Santa Claus. Larry Drake, who
played the villain in dark Man played the deranged Santa

(05:33):
on the Tales from the Crypt TV show. But that
same story, if I remember correctly, was also featured in
the older Tales from the Crypt movie, and of course
it has its roots in the comic itself. Yeah. So okay,
all this is to say is that we before we
get into listener mail this episode, want to talk about
holiday monsters for a little bit. So we each picked
our favorites. Yeah, so of course we've got to start

(05:57):
off with the new patron saint of Christmas. He's everywhere
this Yeah, Crampus has suddenly become popular. Well there at
least an stream movie. Yeah, yeah, which looks fun. I
haven't seen it yet, but I'm looking forward to going to.
I mean, the guy who directed Tricker Treat, Yeah, he's been.
Crampus has been growing in global popularity, I feel each

(06:19):
year so just exponentially. Uh. And it's it's really fascinating
to look at that. I mean, on one hand, it's
kind of you get kind of like that that angst
about it, you know, like I was, I was a
fan when Crampas was Indie. I had dinner with a
with a mutual friend of the show. Uh. E c. Steiner,
who's designed some of the artwork for Stuff to Play
your mon for Monster Science, and we were talking about

(06:41):
the Crampus phenomenon. He's he had that kind of like
they're taking this thing away from us. Man. Yeah, but
and then yeah, on one level, yeah, I get that.
But then on the other level, it is nice to
see the Christmas monster of the Crampus rising to such
such a position of holiday power. So we're all fans
of Crampus. But Robert, you've done deep dive research into

(07:03):
Crampus in the last week or so, because you wrote
how Crampus Works for How Stuff Works. Yeah, it was.
It was the just the other week, first week of
December actually, And Tracy Wilson, who in addition to being
a side directors also of course on us stuff you
missed in history class. She said, Hey, we need a
Crampus article this uh this uh this year. Do you

(07:24):
want to write it? And I said, and I said, well,
we were gonna have to get it out by December five,
because that's a Crampus knock. That's the the eve of
the Feast of St. Nicholas, when Crampus and his kin
come down from the mountains. To terrorize children and threatened
to take them back in a sack and or and
or beat them in the streets for their misdeeds. And
so it was. It was a very quick deep dive

(07:45):
where I had. Luckily, it's the topic I've I've looked
into a number of times in the past. But it
gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with what we
know about crampus history, his uh, his mythic folkloric origins
and uh and indeed this uh, this continuing timeline of
his his rise to power and uh and and the
the efforts of others to crush him back down and

(08:07):
keep Christmas happy. There's a really great uh novel that
actually ec Steiner gave me for Christmas a couple of
years ago, by that artist brom Yeah, Gerald Brown. Yeah.
And it's called Crampus, And it's a really cool Christmas
time horror story about Crampus and about how like sort
of like he waxes and waynes over the years based
on his popularity and how many followers he has. Oh

(08:29):
that's see, that's perfect because one of the things that
that I discovered when I was researching his history was
that uh, if you go back. Of course, Crampus always
has his roots in um in German speaking Alpine uh cultures.
That's that's where he comes from. That's where Austria, Switzerland, Yeah,
a little bit of Italy and any any place where

(08:50):
you can find German speaking mountain people, then they will
likely have some version of Crampus. And of course there
are various versions of it his chan and it's in
the nature of folklore. Right. So before Nazi Germany's invasion
of Austria, Catholic Austro fascist briefly held power, and as
reported in a nineteen forty five New York Times article,

(09:13):
they saw Crampus as a demonic, unruly and also potentially
communist usurper of Christian tradition. Uh. And this was it's crazy.
I think this was a time to where Crampus was
really popular. So he's on all over the postcards and
we've I think we've all seen examples of of these
old cool creepy pick I guess, like if you're out

(09:33):
there and you have no idea what we're talking about,
like Google image search Crampus, but he basically looks kind
of like a giant sader feature with horns and kind
of like a fond coves and and chains sometimes chains
a basket for kid children to throw in the back,
a big alolling tongue that sometimes has serpentine qualities to it.

(09:54):
I'll be sure to link to the part of these
gallery Anti Santa Claus. Yeah, well, he's sort of he's
kind of the anti St. Nick and buy St. Nick.
I mean, the the traditional dour Catholic St. Nicholas. But
he's also kind of like they're kind of like good
cop bad cop. They both have the same mission and
they they're seen side by side. But when it comes

(10:15):
to dressing up as one of these characters at Christmas,
Crampus is always more fun. But at this point during
the Austro Fascist rule, um, he was mad popular that
you buy and not only would you buy all these
postcards and cramp As candies, but he was actually stealing
the role of prime gift giver from Santa. This is

(10:35):
not only coming to your house to scare you, he
was also bringing the gifts. He was completely pushing old St.
Nick out the door. So you'd go to the mall
and line up to sit on this like baffamet laugh
and say, oh please, Crampas I wanna, you know, Super
Nintendo any less creepy than the actual Santa's a mall
are I'm going down another path. My nephews just turned

(10:59):
two years is old, and I don't know. Maybe Bastion's
the same way Robert's son. Every time my sister brings
him to the mall to do the Christmas photos with Santa,
He's just screaming, trying and trying to get Don't blame it.
It was like that for a Bastion at two. At three,
he was more. He had a very you know, very
serious holy respect this entity. But but now I'll refer

(11:22):
everyone to the to the article and some other materials
for a more in depth look at Crampus. But I
will just leave you with that idea that there was
a time, uh prior to a crackdown. They ended up
outlining Crampus and then requiring that Santa Clauses even be
registered with the with the state. But there was this
time where Crampus was about to take over. He was

(11:42):
about to take over the holidays in Austria, but then
the man had to shut it down. The World War two,
we like we could live in a world right now
where everybody celebrates Christmas with Crampus. But are we heading
that way? That we might be heading that way? His
tide is rising again. Hey, Santa didn't have movie this year,
did he? I think that Santa has ever year that

(12:05):
you don't find out about because their direct to video
kids movies. Are they still making the Santa Claus movies?
Are they on the Santa Claus and nine, the one
with the guy from Home Improvement? Yes, I don't know. Okay, well,
I've got my own Christmas monsters to talk about. When
you have personal experience with these monsters. Oh, it was
so wonderful when I found out about them. So last year,

(12:27):
my wife Rachel and I traveled to, uh, the what
I sort of think of as the moonland of Iceland. Like,
I know, it's actually a country on Earth, but for
some reason I started thinking about it. I guess because
of like the Arctic isolation and the geographical character of it.
I think of it as a moon of Europe. Yeah.
I mean I've been Iceland as well, and the volcanic

(12:48):
uh structure of the land makes it feel very lunar. Yeah,
so that moon of Europe. It's wonderful. And as the
guy at the Icelandic rental car place told us Iceland
is full of surprise. One of them is their Christmas
creature folklore. So Icelandic Christmas time has big highlights in
the monster category, and the first one is Gorilla, the

(13:11):
child eater. Gorilla is a wonderful o griss who lives
in caves among the mountains, and her line is pretty
much that the most delicious and wonderful thing on earth
is the steaming flesh of naughty children. So there's a
description of Gorilla written by the Icelandic writer Yawn Arnisson,
and I got this from the Icelandic Museum website. But

(13:33):
it goes like this. Gorilla has three heads and three
eyes in each head, horribly long curved fingernails, icy blue
eyes at the back of the head, and horns like
a goat. Her ears dangled down to her shoulders and
are attached to the nose in front. Trying to picture
that's an interesting piercing. I'd like to see that she

(13:56):
has a beard on her chin is like knotted yarn
in a weave with tangles hanging from it, while her
teeth are like burnt rocks in a great Wow, that's
an awesome image. Brutal. So beginning sometime in the sevente
eighteenth century literature, the legend emerged that Gorilla shows up

(14:16):
in town just before Christmas is about to happen or
something well, and I think probably in smaller towns often,
so there there'd be towns all over, you know, the
farm communities where Grilla shows up before Christmas and it's
time to collect. She is there for the naughty children
and they need to watch out or they will get
dragged back to Gorilla's cave in a sack and boiled

(14:39):
in a big cauldron and then she can devour them.
So there's some some similarities with Crampus here, like the
you know, insertion into the basket or sack for transport
back to the cave or lair. But Grilla also, unlike
Crampus as far as I know, though maybe we can
find out different, Grilla has kids. So together with a

(15:00):
dude named Lepo Lute, she gives birth to a bunch
of children, thirteen of which become more Christmas creatures for Iceland,
the Yule Lads. Crampus that has occasionally he sometimes has siblings,
but I don't think he has any offspring. Now, now
are his siblings also evil or does he have good siblings? Well,

(15:20):
it depends how deep you go into sort of Germanic
pagan origins, because you get into this idea that they're
like the beautiful children and then the ugly children of
the dramatic goddess, and Cramps is definitely on the ugly
side of that equation. I think he's beautiful. Well, so,
the Yule Lads are a group of thirteen trolls who

(15:41):
are all grill as children, and they're they're sort of
a little bit closer to the Father Christmas Santa Claus
type figure, especially that I've seen them. They look like
little like Christmas elf in type things, but they're also
still pretty different. So for the thirteen days leading up
to and including Christmas Eve, one front Yule Lad visits

(16:01):
your house each night. Now, Joe, I have a request here.
Can you please name them as if you are as
if you're Santa Claus uh in the night before Christmas
calling on your reindeer. Oh, let's see if I can
do that. So here they are. They each have names
according to their proclivities on sheep coat, Claude on gully Gawk,
on Stubby, on spoon, liquor on pot scraper, bull liquor,

(16:26):
door slammer and skier, gobbler, on sausage swiper, window peeper,
door sniffer, and meat hook and on candle begger. Uh so,
wait a minute, you may have heard some things in there,
like meat hook. Yeah, that's one of the ones that
comes to your house. So they cause they cause eponymous

(16:46):
mischief in a way. Each one has a name that
lets you know the kind of trouble it gets into.
What kind of trouble is meat hooks? Well, funny you
should ask, because meat hook has a hook and it
reaches into your house with the hook to steal morsels
of meat. Disappointing, I thought he had a hook made
of meat. Yeah, he shows up on St. Thorlax Day,

(17:07):
by the way, a combination of Thor and snorrelax from Pokemon. No,
it's December Thorlak. Come on, you don't. You don't ask
for the patron inche of St. Thorlak. Only when I
need to, well, only when sausage swiper is at my door,
right or door sniffer. Big help then, But anyway, so

(17:30):
meat yeah, meat hook, he steals the meat. But then
there's also one like Skier Gobbler. So in Iceland they've
got this sheep's milky yogurt type stuff. This is a
dense dairy product called skier and uh, and people love it.
They really sing its praises. I didn't really eat much
skier in Icelands. I'm not a big yogurt guy. But

(17:52):
Skier Gobbler comes to empty out your skier tub and
he eats so much that he's about to pop and
he starts howling in pain. So basically he does the
Chinese buffet thing. All right, Hollywood producers listening right now,
we need a gorilla in the Yule Lads movie for Christmas.
Yet on it stat there there's a great source for this.

(18:12):
That was a poem called the Yola s ven Are
Near I hope I said that right by Johannas or
Colum and I read a translation of it into English
that was just delightful. It lets you know about all
the kinds of trouble that they get into. For example,
you remember sheep coat Claude. As far as I know,
what sheep coat Claude tries to do is he harasses sheep.

(18:36):
So he gets into your sheep and he causes trouble,
and he tries to suck their milk. He tries to
suck the milk from the sheep, but the kids are hungry,
Gorilla doesn't feed them. He has he has stiff knees,
and that sort of prevents him from sucking the milk
from the sheep. Correctly, that's a tragic tale. You know.
There was a story book I had as a kid,
and um and I picked up a copy for passion

(18:57):
as well. It's a book of trolls and ogres, and
it has of course the billy goats gruff in it,
and these wonderful illustrations that are reminiscent of of you know,
of Bosh and similar works. But one of the stories
that it involves his house and every Christmas a bunch
of little troll creatures come and just steal all their
food and wreck their feet. But then a traveler with

(19:20):
a with a polar bear. He stays there that night,
and the polar bear hides under the table and then
scares all the trolls away. It sounds like that might
be a derivative of the Ule Lads. I think I
know the name of this traveler. He's probably named Yukon Cornelius.
Oh we'll get to that in a second, but I
have to finish off one more thing about the icelandic tails.

(19:41):
So one last thing about the Eule lads is that
they're softer than they used to be. So I think
they used to also be trolls who would eat children.
But over time I don't know that. I guess the
Icelanders were like, that's a little rough for the kids
constantly be threatened with murder and death at Christmas. Uh,
So they changed it to where the Yule adds. Now

(20:03):
they bring the little gifts. So you put your shoe
up on the window sill and the ul lads will
leave small presents or candies in the shoe if you've
been good. If you've been bad, they used to eat you,
but they no longer eat you. Now they just bring
you rotting potatoes. Oh god, that's still unpleasant. And then
there's one more creature in Iceland. It's the Yule cat.

(20:23):
The old cat is the pet of Gorilla, the child
eater and Luti. So they have this Christmas cat and
it apparently there was, or maybe still is an expression
Iceland that if you don't get any new clothes for Christmas.
You are quote dressing the Yule Cat or quote ending

(20:43):
up in the Yule Cat. So it's possible that the
Yule Cat will pretty much eat you if you don't
have a nice new sweater for the Christmas season. So
this kind of ups the anti giving bad clothing that
you end up getting. Yeah, where was the Yule Cat
when we were growing up, Like that would have been
I'm gonna have to use that all those Cosby sweaters. Yeah,

(21:04):
it's literally a matter of life or death underwear variant
that only comes after you if you don't get underwear
for Christmas. Well, mine is pretty pop culture reference. It's
not from like another nation or culture. Uh is from
those Rootolph the Red Nose Reindeer stop motion movies that

(21:25):
I grew up with and loved so much as a kid.
Although I went back and rewatched them. My wife and
I actually bought it for a friend of ours kid
for Christmas a couple of years ago. And there's some
there's some dicey uh treatment of women in those movies
and raised as a little Yeah, but as many of
you probably remember from seeing those, uh, the Abominable snow

(21:49):
Monster of the North is my favorite Christmas Monster, also
known as the Bumble as he's so named by Yukon Cornelius,
who was an experts in all things. I want to
throw in that. Uh, my son Bastion has informed me
that the Abominable Snowman in this film is a real monster.
Monster is a real monster. Okay, Well, I trust Bastion.

(22:11):
He's got some insight that he's raised being raised by
Dr Anton Jessop. Now, now where does does the Abominable
Snowman hold a candle to bad Cow? Like which one
would win in a fight? Um? I don't know, because
there's not just bad cow anymore. Now there's India monster
that lives It's a blue monster that lives in India,
but a different India where there are no cows, people

(22:33):
or animals. And then likewise, there's an Africa monster that
lives in Africa and his purple and it's a different
Africa where there are no elephants, giraffes, animals or people.
I can't wait until Bastion is writing the stories of
tomorrow that they're going to be great. Uh. So you know,
Abominable snow Monster, the Bumble he hates Christmas? Uh can't

(22:55):
float in water. These are all things we learn from
mukon Cornelius because the Mumble doesn't really talk. He can't flow. Yeah,
that's like one of the things that one of the
ways they get away from him is like by breaking
off a chip of ice and and floating away on
it because he can't swim, so he can't float. He
prefers pork to deer meat. So there's like a scene
where he's like theoretically about to eat the reindeer, but

(23:16):
they u can. Cornelius makes noises like a pig to
attract the Bumble because the Bumble wants to have some pork. Uh,
And then of course bumbles bounce. Oh I know though,
Uh the spoilers for Rudolph restring Deer. Yeah, ukn Cornelius
in the Bumble to take a tumble off a cliff,
but they miraculously show up alive, and the Bumble is

(23:37):
now a nice guy. He's he's on the good side
of Christmas. But but go into detail on that, because
this is this disturbed me in recent years. How do
they tame the Bumble? Okay, I believe the way that
they tame him is that the elf who wants to
grow up to be a dentist, takes all the bumble's
teeth out right, so he can't like chop on them anymore.
So he basically just gives up on hating Christmas and

(23:59):
being a carnivore. It turns into a hostile movie. Oh yeah,
the seriously go back and watch those. They're weird and scary.
I have to say it's particularly disturbing to me because
I've been watching the nick Fabulous Cinemax show, probably my
favorite television show right now, dealing with you know, medicine

(24:19):
at the turn of the century, and you know, all
these fantastic, flawed characters. But there's a character that shows
up based based on a very real individual named Dr
Henry Cotton, an early twentieth century psychiatrist who treated psychiatric
patients by removing all of their teeth, saved them from

(24:40):
their madnest and he even did this to his own
children to save them from from madness. And on the show,
he's played by John Hodgman in his Friends, yeah, in
his and it's John Hodgman in his least like likable performance,
and therefore I would say his best performance because he
really want to drown him in a mud puddle. The

(25:01):
whole time, so so crazy and reckless with his pseudoscience.
But yeah, I can't help but think of that he
influenced that story. Yeah, I don't know. All maybe we
should do an Abominable Snowman episode at one point, But
all I could find real brief research was that the
origin for that term. I mean, of course it's referencing

(25:23):
the yeti um, but the origin for that specific term
came from some men at the turn of the century
twentieth century writing about Mount Everest. But I don't quite
know the specifics. But maybe this dentist played into it
in some way. Yeah, I just don't like that they
essentially tormented the uh this wild noble beast into submission inship.
Yeah no, seriously, Like there's you can never enjoy pork again. Well,

(25:47):
I mean, I guess they could make a pork slurry
for it, and they could drink it like a shake
or something. But yeah, that's what it takes. See, that's
what it takes to get somebody into Christmas. You think
you guys are gonna have to rip all of my
teeth out in order to to make me happy on
the holiday. You can't see the sad face I'm making.
So what better segue? Let's hit some listener mail. Guys.

(26:09):
Is Arnie the robot here? Here is he is? He
works on Christmas? Oh, he works all the time, robot.
He has no beliefs. He can't complain. All he really
fears is a loss of power supply. Oh interesting, Well,
what does he got for us? All right? This first
one comes to us from Facebook. We heard just the
other day from listener Nick responding. Uh, I believed to

(26:33):
a couple of episodes. Are M d M A series
as well as our episode on psychopathic children? Uh? He
writes in and says, would M d M A help
psychopaths or sociopaths with their condition? I can't really find
anything on this. Huh. Well, all right, we're not experts
in these things. We just read about them and then

(26:55):
talked about them for the podcast. But let's let's kind
of back up here and see where next coming from
on this. So theoretically M d M A helps those
in therapy, like people with PTSD, with reducing their fear
and developing their trust. Right. And then on the other hand,
one of the principles of psychopathic and sociopathic individuals is

(27:16):
that they're Essentially, they're there. Empathy mechanisms are present, but
are in a default off position, so you have to
you can. Research has shown that you can engage them
in certain uh UM therapies and thought experiments to force
those empathetic systems to come online. And their brains are

(27:37):
as we know from our Killer Children episode, their brains
are actually physically different. Yeah um had they have less
gray matter in some scenarios. I don't know that I
necessarily see a correlation just right off the bat that
doing M D M A therapy would help with psychopathy.
But I wouldn't be surprised if that's a line of
research that somebody would pursue. I I haven't seen. I

(27:58):
did a brief search to see if any you know,
research materials would come up, and I was not finding anything.
But I guess, on one hand, it would be a
really hard sell, especially since a lot of the psychopathy
experiments that we've seen are conducted on criminals, because that
is a great place to to find of psychopaths when
it comes to, you know, population comparisons, and it would

(28:21):
be hard to sell people on that, Hey, we're gonna
get some prisoners and we're gonna put fullam up where
we're much more comfortable with doing our experiments on college students. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't know, Nick, I'm not quite sure that I
can see like a direct connection there, But maybe there's
somebody out there who knows a little bit more about
the sort of neurochemistry going on. Yeah, because I think

(28:42):
that's the thing is you're dealing with a slightly different neurochemistry,
so the m d m A might not affect them
in the same way. And plus we're still we're still
figuring out exactly how m d m A assisted therapy
works with just the average individual's brain. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
it'll be interesting to see if stuff like that comes
up down the line. I mean, as we said in
the m dum A episode, I believe that they're looking

(29:02):
at like a five to ten year a period of
time before it becomes more publicly available. Yeah. I wasn't
involved in the m d m A episode, but I
can certainly see just based on the kind of anecdotal
phenomenology reports about m d MY people often say things
about it increasing empathy, and if empathy lack is exactly

(29:24):
what right that may be Where Nick is getting the
idea that it could be potentially helpful. Yeah, I'm not sure.
I guess if it Yeah, if it decreases fear, which
a psychopath doesn't have necessarily, then it would be difficult
for it to increase trust as well. Yeah, Like their
issue isn't that they're afraid or bundled up? Yeah, and

(29:47):
therefore less willing to engage in open discussion about their
feelings and other people's feelings. Yeah. Yeah, it's the actual
feelings themselves. Well, i'd be curious there to it. All, Right,
what do we got? What else do we got? Well,
I decided that we we got so much listener mail
that was so great about the episodes Robert and I

(30:07):
did on Tetris. I'm going to have to confine my
readings on this episode entirely to stuff we got about
the Tetris episodes. But they're they're all worth it because
people had some really great feats and come in they
were really good ones. Yeah. People people love those episodes.
You guys, everybody can relate to Tetris. So here's the
first one of these Tetris emails, and this is from

(30:29):
our listener Luan, and Luan says, hey, guys, in your
recent episode, on Tetris Syndrome, you briefly mused over the
idea of a video game designed by Timothy Leary. Amazingly enough,
such a game exists. Many years ago, I went down
an abandonedware wormhole and discovered the gym Mind Mirror. I

(30:49):
remember only playing it a couple of times and found
it incredibly depressing. It was an utterly incomprehensible life simulator
that begins in the womb. The game progresses as you
make moral and life decisions from a number of options
based on scenarios presented to you. There were other aspects
to the program that I never explored. They appeared to

(31:11):
be a number of psychological tools the user could utilize
on a journey of self discovery. Anyway, I thought you
would want to know because it's weird and awesome. Yeah,
it sounds right up our alley. Thanks for the podcast.
And then Luan also adds a PS saying pretty please
do a show on either or both of my heroes,
Robert Anton Wilson and Sir Richard Francis Burton. Neither are

(31:34):
as well known as they deserve to be. Yeah, Captain
Sir Richard Francis Burton is indeed a phenomenal individual, and
I could definitely see us doing an Illuminati Robert Anton
Wilson type thing down the road. That would be very interesting.
In fact, and this ties into what else I was
going to say about Lunn's email. He might be one
of our Psychedelic Avengers. So we've been talking about how

(31:55):
over the last you know, a couple episodes that we
keep mentioning the sort of psychedelic Luminaries, Timothy Leary being
among them. I think we're putting together a team psycondelic Avengers,
Robert Anton Wilson might be. Now, would Timothy Leary be
one of the Avengers or would he be the Samuel
Jackson character. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. What's

(32:17):
that guy's name, Nick Fury? Nick Fury, Yeah, Yeah, I'm
not as big a Yeah, I know, superhero and I'm
a huge nerd uh. So you're saying the Timothy Leary
is the one who gathers them up all together and
and he's sort of the glue that keeps them together. No,
he's the he's the guy who's unnecessarily propounding rules for

(32:38):
everybody else. So okay, well, who do we have so far?
We've got Timothy Leary, We've got yeah, Alexander Shulgin, Terrence McKenna,
Terrence McKenna, I think particularly, but possibly throwing Alan Watts, Yeah, yeah,
and maybe Grant Morrison. Grant Morrison would maybe be like
a second year member. Yeah, I think you would have

(32:59):
a different generation and the psychedelic of injuries you'd have
to roll out. Yeah. And so this also brought to
mind that Joe and I just recently watched a movie
together that had Timothy Leary in it, Wes Craven's Shocker
Timothy Leary TV Preacher. He's he's on TV talking about
how the Lord wants more more cash for Christ, and

(33:19):
then Shocker and the protagonist of the movie jump into
the TV and are actually interacting with the Timothy Leary evangelist.
Like as in some of our format I had no
idea what the movie is worth watching that should go
in the canons of the great bad movies. He's in
nineties there. I don't know. I don't know why it's

(33:42):
not up there with like a Highlander two and the
other ones. Everybody knows Mitch Poleggy is the bad guy.
Mitch POLEGGI could have been like the next Freddy Krueger
of the nineties. What should I know him from? He's
from X Files. He plays Skinner on the X Files.
Oh he was. This is the guy that was later
on the Motorcyle Show. Oh yeah, yeah, he was on
Sons of Anarchy, and then he was on Supernatural for

(34:03):
a little Yeah. Yeah. He plays the prisoner who gets
electrocuted and somehow makes a deal with electric voodoo gods
to become electricity. Yeah, what way, he's an electricity ghosts.
What's so weird about that? It's it's amazing. Okay. This
one comes to us from Elizabeth and she says, Hi,
I just listened to your podcast about detectives and overall

(34:25):
it was really interesting. So this was actually before I
had officially joined the show. We did uh an episode
together where I guest hosted. We talked about detective stories.
So she says, part of it focused on a fascination
we seem to have with the incredibly fantastically grotesque scenes
in our modern detective style horror, like in the TV
show Hannibal. And while that's true, it also reminded me

(34:46):
of the author. I might be pronouncing this wrong. Ido
go Wa Rampo, who is really known for those kinds
of mystery stories. Iowa Rampo, though, is the pseudonym of
the author here I Taro, who was greatly influenced by
Western authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Uh And, as we discussed in that episode, Edgar Allan

(35:08):
Poe is kind of like the father of the detective
story with murders of the room work, right, Okay, His
pseudonym sounds similar in Japanese celebrity to Edgar Allan Poe's name,
as in Japanese phonetics, Poe's name would be Edo Ga
Aaron Poe, and when you say it that way, it
sounds really similar to Edo Gawa ron Po. Anyway, his

(35:31):
body of work started out as more of a detective procedural,
but after some time evolved into a literary genre called
ero guru nonsensus, which stands for erotic, grotesque and nonsensical,
which runs rather strongly and similar to scenes like in
Hannibal that can be a complete trip or are psychologically haunting,
and that it brings into question what we think of

(35:52):
as personal space for humans. This sounds right up our alley, guys,
now I want to read some of this stuff. He's
a fairly modern writer, but he is active since pre
World War Two and has some notable works which have
been translated into English. I just thought this would be
an interesting thing to share since it seemed like you
guys cited some more modern examples of this. But Ito
Gowa Gawa Rampo is I keep wanting to just say,

(36:15):
Edgar Allan Poe is more of an early twenty century
author in an international writer who is inspired by Western
detective stories. Uh and then they Although not a mystery
writer technically, Tycho Kono has also done some short stories
that tend to diverge into pathology that runs along similar lines.
Her stories in particular were really interesting, to say the
least to myself and my classmates at the time, because

(36:38):
they would start out completely normal and then they would
take a turn that no one expected. They left quite
an impression on us. And that's from Elizabeth. Yeah, that
sounds awesome. I want to check that out. Yeah, so
I'm adding that to my my my wish list of
of books that's growing by the minute, especially since after
hearing that, I'm instantly thinking of various examples of particularly

(37:00):
in a Japanese horror and some some of the Japanese
comic material and wondering it does it have its roots
and yeah, or if the same cultural influences on those
things influence this, then it also sounds like would be
perfect for me. Okay. Going back to a lot of
the response we got on our Tetris episodes, a good
bit of this came to in the episode we asked

(37:22):
question about the subject of E M d R, which
is a type of therapy that is uh. They has
a lot of support um and a lot of people
are are very into it and say that it really works,
but I think it's also controversial, and so we asked
if anybody has practiced this in their own in their
own therapy sessions and what they had to say about it,

(37:43):
and we got a lot of feedback on us, mostly positive.
We heard from a couple of people saying they thought
it didn't work, or at least it didn't work for them,
and then we also heard from a lot of people
saying that it was a big it made a big
difference in their lives. And I'm going to read one
of these and this is from our listener Kristen Kristen says, Hey,
stuff to blow your mind. Loved your Ignobel Prize episode.

(38:04):
But to get to the real reason I'm sending this
email is because I've received am about to begin another
set session of e M d R. I served in
Afghanistan in two thousand eleven and two thousand twelve with
the U. S. Army psy OPS, which is Psychological Operations
SCORE working with detainees in prisons overseas. After coming home

(38:24):
from Afghanistan and getting out of the Army, it was
difficult to deal with the memories and experiences doing what
I did. I went to traditional therapy for a few years,
but that wasn't really working with addressing the crippling flashbacks.
My therapist and I had built a great rapport very
needed in this type of intensive therapy and decided to
try it with a smaller, less intrusive negative memory that

(38:47):
wasn't combat related. The goal is to find the right
since driven outlet to the e M d R. Before
getting started. You can do audio visual or tactile, or
as I did, a combination three out of three. You
talk through whatever memory or experience you're hung up on
while audio hearing clicks or beeps or chimes and headphones,

(39:10):
visual studying light patterns on an l e ED type screen,
or tactile hand buzzers held in the hands that either
very in intensity, speed, flipped from hand to hand, etcetera.
I've heard of the retinal version of this before. Okay, yeah,
the main ones we knew about going in. We're just
mentioning that that it had to do with eye movements.

(39:31):
But what we heard from multiple listeners is that it's
not just eye movements but multiple types of physical, physical
spatial interactions. Uh So, Kristen continues, I'm going to be
very honest and open about this as I am with
all my experiences with therapy, because this is something important.
Soldiers are hurting. E m d R is extremely difficult
to get through. After my first session, and this memory

(39:54):
wasn't even combat related, I cried for true story hours.
Your brain pathways are being redirected through magic kidding, and
this will impact how you really view your world and
who you believe you are. But if you stick with it,
whatever negative way, the brain prints this memory, E m
d R will rewrite it, help you deal with it,

(40:14):
and my favorite part of it, forgive you for it
and change your view of it. Any other questions, I
have no problems answering. Thank you so much for bringing
this up. And then Kristen also says in a PS,
I should have put this before, but my therapist is
with the vet center, separate from the v A, and
she as uh and the rest of the staff she
would get a very huge shout out. They do more

(40:35):
work than the v A and get none of the credit.
The staff at vet centers across the country is literally
saved my life, and I'm sure they saved countless others.
Thank you, and she thanks her doctor. Yeah, that is
really heartwarming to hear, first of all, like a firsthand
account of this. Uh. The other thing that particularly struck
me was we received this right as Robert and I

(40:56):
were doing the research for the m d m A
episode on how m d m A is used to
treat PTSD. Yeah. We didn't plan to do those back
to back like that, but yeah, just sort of accidental
synchronicity there, Yeah, which we often find between episodes. Mm. Yeah,
So you know, I'd be curious if Kristen, Uh, it
sounds like she probably doesn't have an experience with this,

(41:17):
but if she knows other soldiers who have potentially uh
experimented with the M d M a treatment for PTSD.
It sounded like from the research that we had read
that there had been great strides with it, specifically with vets.
Yeah when you look at the Yeah, that the the
success of percentiles for sure. Yeah. So I wanted to
give a big thanks to Kristen and to all the
other people who got in touch with us about their

(41:39):
stories using E M d R and and how it
has affected their lives. All right, we have another one here.
This one comes to us, So this is a less
happy with your mail. This one comes to us from Maria,
and I do want to go ahead mention that Maria
is a special education teacher and she entitled this one
babysitting a psychopathic kid. So we just got this man

(42:01):
in response to the episode of Christian and I did
about that just published yesterday. See how fast we get these.
I haven't even read this one yet. Well here we
got back. Here it goes and this is kind of
a linked email, so I'm just gonna read selections from it,
uh four time. But but again I want to thank
her for for writing in and giving us a little
more personal insight into this topic. She says, Hey, guys,

(42:21):
wanted to write in about my own experience with babysitting
a psychopathic child. There's some anecdotal stuff coming, but at
the end I have an interesting thought for you. As
a teenager, I got a babysitting gig for a very
special family. Of their five children, the oldest is autistic
and the youngest has down syndrome, but they were the
easy ones to take care of the second oldest child.
We will call her Molly, not her real name, was

(42:42):
outwardly normal, but turned out to be the real trouble.
After listening to your podcast, you confirmed at the suspicions
I had formed all those years ago about Molly. She
made me uncomfortable as no other kid ever had. She
was precocious, but oddly heartless, discarding the feelings of her
siblings just a little too easily. I thought that she
was a psychopath. I wish I had been wrong. The

(43:02):
first sign that something was off was that Molly threw
tantrums well after her sixth birthday. Have you ever tried
to pull a six year old off her younger brother
after he ate the last marshmallow? She was big enough
to hurt me while I attempted to carry her off
to her room, leaving me with a bloody nose and
a black eye. At least once. She wasn't trying to
hurt me, but she certainly didn't care that she had.
Once she hid in the house after I had scolded her,

(43:24):
I looked for for over an hour, my panic growing.
When I found the front door unlocked, I knew she
was capable of running away. As I braced myself to
call her parents and the police, and after stirring myself
up into hysterics, she came downstairs and laughed at me.
She was constantly manipulating me and her parents. Between the
three of us, we never knew what to believe. Finally,
we just wouldn't let her do anything without verifying it

(43:46):
with another adult. That made her angry, cue another tantrum.
I also remember her trying to convince me that she
was allowed to do something. She crawled into my lap
and stared deep, deep into my eyes while she tried
to convince me, almost like she was trying to hypnotize me.
Very ep Sometimes we thought it was just jealousy. After
her mom gave birth to twins, and she and the
babies had to spend a few weeks in the hospital.
Maybe she just needed a little extra attention, so we

(44:09):
made sure she got it. But once she had you
in her control, you couldn't walk away. No matter what
was going on outside her bedroom, whether dinner needed to
be cooked or if another kid was crying. She would
put herself between me and the doorway and say I
couldn't leave. When I had to insist and physically push
my way past her, that would start a tantrum too
fast forward a few years, I met her family at

(44:29):
a down syndrome benefit and nearly fainted when I saw Molly.
Her hair was gone, cheered off into uneven, stubbly mess.
Noticing my shock, her mother explained, by age nine, Molly
had developed Trictottlemania, where she compulsively pulled out her own hair, eyebrows, eyelashes.
But it didn't stop there. The family cats were suddenly
missing whiskers and for two. On a brighter note, Maria

(44:53):
relates that Molly has been receiving therapy since she was
about five, and she happens to live in an area
where there's a There are a lot of opportunity these
for for care and therapy for children like this with
special needs. She closes out here by saying, but speaking
of the stigma of psycho psychopathy, I can't help but
remain cautious about Molly. She's a teenager now and comes
across it is very sweet when you meet her, but

(45:15):
somewhere deep down I will always wonder if that shrieking
banshee of a child is just waiting to emerge. Anyway,
have a lovely, lovely evening, gentleman. I wish I could
have written on a happier topic. Keep up the good work. Well,
I can see now why she responded so quickly. Uh
that it sounds like she had a very personal experience
and what we mentioned in the episode definitely struck her

(45:35):
as potentially being what she was experiencing here. So okay,
from the research we did for the episode. I mean again,
I'm not a doctor, but yeah, the the level of
violence and manipulation sounds like the psychopathy. Um. There's something
about seeing this kind of condition in a child that

(45:56):
emphasizes the unfairness of it. Like we're so used to
being able to um to assign blame to people when
they're awful as adults. You know, people just if somebody
manipulates people and is violent and all that. You know,
it's it's pretty easy to condemn them, and certainly we
do have to take defensive measures against people who who

(46:18):
have destructive behaviors. But I don't know that there's another
side to it that's sad when when you imagine that,
you know, to a certain extent, people can be born
with conditions that they didn't pick. You know, they didn't
ask to be born with a with a brain condition
that makes them violent and manipulative. And our culture certainly
doesn't UM at the moment, really understand how to cope

(46:42):
with this kind of condition. And so I don't know anyway,
especially when you see it in a child, just the
the stark unfairness of the situation emerges, at least to me.
And the thing that I think is important to keep
in mind is one of one of the points that
we kept, you know, kind of the main theme of
that episode we kept coming back to, which is that
it's a combination of nature and nurture, right that UM

(47:04):
children with psychopathy in the case that we were talking
mainly about where juvenile homicidal offenders, they do have different brains.
There's definite evidence that shows that their brains have different
structures in them, they have less gray matter, but there's
also evidence that through treatment you can help these things.
You can help add back in gray matter or help

(47:28):
their brains sort of you know, become quote unquote more normal, right,
But you know that requires a very specific type of
caring for these children. And Maria's letter reminded me of
this New York Times piece that was a very well
written feature about a family that had a child like

(47:48):
this and all of the measures that they went through
and the um treatment that they were going through with
their child as well. It just kind of reminded me
of that. So I hope that that, you know, um,
the child that she's referring to is getting that same
kind of care, and it sounds like she is. But
you know, one of the things is you just know
that there are also children out there. They are not

(48:08):
receiving this level of treatment, this level of care, and
their their condition is not being approached with this level
of understanding, and yeah, they're just gonna fall through the crap. Luckily,
it sounds like her parents are engaged with her, whereas
like some psychopathic children who have these natural brain uh
malformations I guess are also neglected and abused by their parents,

(48:31):
which only makes the problem worse. Okay, moving on to
the next email. We got some great correspondence from our listener,
Jim also about the Tetris episode. He sent us several
really great emails and I don't have time to read
the whole correspondence, but here's some selections from it. Jim
opened on the question that we started our first Tetris

(48:51):
episode with about about math, whether math is a human
invention or a human discovery, and Jim says, you start
with the old philosophical question of mathematics being an invention
or discovery. I had written to you several years ago
in this when you brought it up in a previous podcast.
I won't repeat that, but the best description I've heard
was from Steven Strogats book The Joy of X. I

(49:16):
am paraphrasing, but he said that the axioms of a
mathematical system are the invention, then the conclusions from those
axioms would be a discovery. I thought this was an
interesting distinction. I liked it. He goes on. He says,
I like to use a chess analogy for this. The
game of chess is an invention. That is, the board,

(49:37):
the pieces, their movements capture. A description of this invention
fits on a single sheet of paper. However, there are
shelves of books that go into the extensive discovery of chess,
that is, how to play the game well, forks, pins,
pawn strategy, book upon book, catalog the discovery of chess
that comes from the simple one sheet invention. The same

(50:00):
is true of mathematics. Most mathematical inventions are fairly small,
but the discovery conclusions are endless. So I think the
adaptation of that would be that the mathematical sort of
symbols and concepts we come up with our human inventions,
they don't, at least on this point of view, exist
anywhere in the universe. You know, three and the and

(50:22):
the plus and the equals don't. But three plus three
equal six is not an invention. That's a discovery. It's
a fact that existed about the universe before we invented
these tools to discover it. Um And then also he
has some great thoughts about whether Tetris is solvable. So
this is the thing we talked about in the first

(50:42):
Tetris episode. He says, I'd like to clarify something about
tetris being unsolvable. It is solvable, but the solution is
for all practical purposes too inefficient to be useful. Since
tetris is part of the MP complete problem set, no
known efficient solution exists. These type of problems are called intractable.

(51:03):
In essence, the known solution is to try every possible
combination of moves, then pick the best out of the
entire set. It's a solution, but it's brute force, and
except for the smallest scenarios, there isn't enough computing power
to run all of the combinations efficiently. MP complete problems
are very interesting. There are a subset of MP problems.

(51:25):
I won't go into the formal definition of P n
P or MP complete, but like tetris, NP problems are
solvable only by brute forcing through every possible combination. What
makes MP complete problems interesting is that any MP problem
can be reduced or transformed to an instance of an

(51:45):
MP complete problem in an efficient amount of time. Therefore,
if we find an efficient solution to just one MP
complete problem, then we would have an efficient solution for
all MP problems. Efficient solutions are identified as P the
biggest question in computer theory and possibly mathematics as a whole,
is whether P and n P are two different sets

(52:08):
or really the same set. The problem has been around
for forty or more years and no one has proved
the equality or inequality, and a lot of brilliant minds
have tried. This is actually a subject that I'm speaking
for myself now. I've wanted to do this for a while,
but it's been really difficult. Whenever I get into the
preliminary research for it is just like dealing with the

(52:30):
abstract problems and it's it's just difficult to concretize. But yeah,
it is this huge fascinating question in computation theory. Are
all problems that can be checked for a solution inherently
solvable efficiently? It sounds like a real Kobashuma road to me.

(52:53):
And Jim has some other great comments about the the
p NP issue. But um, but yeah, that is something
that if I can never figure out a way to
concretize it, I'd like to come back and deal with
on the show someday. Reminds me of that David Foster
Wallace book about infinity that like, it's such an incredibly
dense difficult topic, but he's somehow everything and more. Yeah,

(53:16):
he somehow tried to make it sexy. Yeah, Infinity is
a wonderful, wonderful topic we covered in a previous podcast episode.
But it's it's the kind of thing I would love
to explore it again. I love to revisit Alright, So
there you have it. You know, the robot is giving
us some signals here, uh and uh, it means that
we are out of time for listener Mail. We weren't

(53:37):
able to fit in as mini on this episode, but
that's because we uh, we include some monsters fair holiday,
and you know what we're gonna be back in. We'll
have lots of episodes and lots of ways to read
listener Mail. I already got some ideas for new episodes
just from uh this this episode. Al Right. Well, in
the meantime, head on over to stuff about your Mind

(53:59):
dot com. That's the mothership. That's where we'll find all
the blog posts the podcast. You'll find videos, you'll find
links out to our our many wonderful social media accounts. Yeah,
that includes Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler and Periscope. Right, guys,
We'll be on Periscope on Friday's noon Eastern Standard time,
except for maybe the next week or two just because

(54:20):
of the holidays and weirdness with traveling schedules, and during Christmas,
you're just gonna find ad. Yeah, we've got the el
ads on duty. But I'll try to keep everybody updated
on our social media accounts and when we will be
on Periscope and when we'll be back on our regular schedule.
And if you want to get in touch with us
with a message that may one day end up on
a listener mail episode of its own, you can email

(54:42):
us and blow the minded. How stuff works dot com
for more on this and bathrooms of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com. The T five five

(55:13):
five po