Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:21):
Welcome to Why We Do what We Do.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
I am your reanimated host Abraham.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
And I am your Scientific Misstep host Shane.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
We are a psychology podcast. We talk about the things
that humans and non human animals do, and in the
month of October we take some time to cover some
spooky topics because Halloween is this month, and what a
better time to celebrate sort of the macabre than in
the season dedicated to that very subject.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, today we are covering Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Now here's
the thing. We're going to talk about the story because
the story itself is fascinating and it is a science
story at its core. Yeah, and we're going to talk
about how it was written, which is just fun happenstance.
And then we're going to talk about the psychology of it,
because you know, we're a psychology podcast. And ye, could
we really reanimated corpse? Well maybe, And that's the scary thing.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
We can animate this podcast episode, We certainly can. This
is our fifth year doing Halloween episodes. So far this
year we have covered the Bermuda triangle and we have
covered the variance of Hell. Anyway, our full length episodes
come out on Wednesdays. Our mini episodes come out on Mondays,
and that's all the stuff that we release, which is
kind of a lot of stuff for two people for

(01:35):
whom this podcast is like a thing we do on
the side for fun. Yeah, we keep ourselves so busy.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
It's a project. It's a side project.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah. Yeah, it feels like a career, but it's actually
a side project. We keep ourselves so busy. So anyway,
welcome so much. We are glad that you joined us.
If you're here for the first time, then thank you
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(02:05):
us on Patreon, pick up some merch, tell a friend.
I'll talk more about those at the end of this discussion.
But I want to also wish everyone a happy Blind
Americans Equality Day. It's very important.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yes, yes, yes, it's also Broad Day, USA.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Oh. I thought maybe it was just br.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yeah, maybe I don't know. I think it's I think
it's broad Day, but it could like it could be bra, Like,
what's up bra? That would be that would be fun.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
It would make sense that it's bra as in the clothing,
the garments, because it's also Breast Health Day.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, yeah, that's fair. It's also Global Dignity Day. It
is Global hand Washing Day. It's so important now more
than ever since we've gotten rid of preventive medicine yes, yes,
and effective medicine. Yeah. Yeah. I'm reading Do You Believe
In Magic? By Paul Offit right now and I'm just like, oh,
it's very good. Is this is this new No, it's
an older one. It's I think it was.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Okay, but it is good.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
It's it's it's just about pseudoscience and how yeah. Yeah,
people get into it. So anyway, ponus recommendation. If you
want something scary, it's hagfish Day. It's I Love Lucy Day.
Oh that's fun.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
It is Love your Body Day. Speaking of which, it's
National Cheese curd Day.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
I support that. It is National fossil Day mmm.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
And for all of you out there listening and you
know who you are, it is National grouch Day.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Man, love that trash can monster. It is National mushroom Day.
Love that.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Oh my gosh yeah, that could be Abraham Day. I
love it. It is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day,
very important.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yes, it is National PUG Day.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
It is National take your Parents to Lunch Day. That's sweet,
that's so wholesome. It is White Cane Safety Day. We
have so many holidays because it's also bone Joint Health
Action Week.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
It certainly is. It's also Improved your Home Office Week.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
It's Infection control Week. Also, really appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yep. It is meditation week.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
It is a meditation or mediation.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
It's mediation week.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Okay, I mean honestly, it could be a typo. Could
go either way. It could be it is pet peeve week.
Maybe being correct about typos might be a pet peeve.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
That doesn't bother me. I know I type fast and
often capitalized letters that shouldn't be capitalized, So that's fine.
It is a school lunch week, so get your school
lunch rectangle pizza.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, and it's finally teen read week, so get your
Rectangle book and read it.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, please do.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
But we do more than just talk about holidays. We
talk about psychology things, and then we talk about spooky
psychology things. And as you mentioned, Shane, and I'm just
gonna say it again, we thought it'd be really fun
to visit Mary Shelley's Frankenstein because this is one of
my favorite horror books. It is an incredibly well written,
beauty full story that's just tragic and heartbreaking and extremely

(05:04):
well constructed. And the story behind it is pretty much
equally fascinating to the story itself, which is I think
a hard feat to pull off. So we're gonna we're
going to talk about that. I think that's all the
preamble before we get to our topic. Is there anything
I'm missing or you would like to add before we
start talking about a monster? No, I think we're good, beautiful, Well,

(05:25):
let's begin. Then, many of us are familiar with the
story of Frankenstein or some version of it in some capacity. Yeah,
and this is that in this story, a scientist decides
to violate the laws of God and bestow life upon
inanimate matter to create an undead creature that subsequently reeks
havoc along the countryside. And that's our topic. But we

(05:48):
also want to ask the question could this really happen? Like,
could science accomplish such a feat?

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Yeah? And so in this booky entry, we learn how
Greek mythology, volcanoes, the alps, and brains are all connected.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Whoa, we haven't done one of these in a minute,
I forgot.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, I thought that'd be fun.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
I love that that throwback connecting all things together.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
So yeah, yeah, let's get into it. Let's I mean,
so we are going to talk about the story Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein as like the primary thing, because the story
itself is interesting. So this book was subtitled The Modern Prometheus.
There's your Greek mythology. Yeah, so it's Frankenstein or the
Modern Prometheus, and Frankenstein is the eighteen eighteen novel written
by a young, very young Mary Shelley.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yes, so in this in the story, the short version
of this you may or may not be familiar with, listener,
is that scientist Victor Frankenstein or Frankenstein. What persuasion you
hail from Frankenstein? He decides he's going to do a

(06:52):
science experiment in which he makes a creature from different
body parts and animates it to life, and when it works,
he panics upon seeing his newly created creation and runs away,
leaving the creature completely alone. That's very confused, barely aware creature,
and upon returning the following day, the creature is now gone,

(07:15):
so he is cobbled together some corpus pieces bestowed them
with life.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
He's terrified at what he's.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Done and runs away, and then the thing that he
created is gone, and he's sort of like, okay, I
let me get my heart rate back to normal.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in his time away he learns
the creature specifically, he wakes up and goes, what the
f and then he goes. He goes on, and he
learns to make fire, He learns to speak, and he
learns to read by observing people. He even saves a
little girl from drowning, only to be shot by the
child's father. The father's like, no, don't do that and
shoots him, and so, you know, this obviously upsets the creature,

(07:51):
and he turns his rage back on humanity and specifically
Victor himself. He kills Victor's brother and frames someone else
in the family as a revenge plot.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yes, and we should have maybe started with spoiler warning
in case you wanted to read this book and just
weren't familiar with it. I mean, it's a.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Fairly new new read in eighteen eighteen.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, it's over two hundred years old, so welcome to
the brand new club, I guess. But it's still a
great story, and like we are not going to do
justice to how beautifully written the prose is, and yes,
how eloquently the story is actually told. So even knowing
the actual plot, I think you can find great joy

(08:31):
in this text. Yeah, you should go read it regardless. Yeah,
but we continue on. So the monster has killed people,
he has saved people. He's a complex character here, Frankenstein's
monster is. During this time, though, Victor did not learn
his lesson, and instead he decides to create the bride
of Frankenstein. The bride of the monster, specifically, the monster's lonely.

(08:55):
He wants a partner and asks for a partner, and
he decides he is going to create a partner because
the creature has specifically requested this. He says, like, I
please give me something like I have nobody. I am lonely.
I just want to have like someone I can have
a relationship with. But then Frankenstein also realizes, well, if
I create this, if I create a partner for this beast,

(09:17):
they might even have undead baby things. And so Instead,
he decides to destroy his second experiment, and this creature,
who's already kind of enraged and was like, now finally
getting his hopes up that maybe there's some justice in
the world, maybe I won't be so lonely, maybe I'll
have a companion. And so he gets his hopes up,
and then his partner to be is destroyed and he's

(09:39):
very upset, and so he murders Victor's wife on their
wedding night, which causes Victor's dad to die with grief later.
So Victor's life is also like just laden with tragedy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, By the end of this book, the only person
that's left alive in Victor's family is his brother, his brother.
I believe his brother's name is Evan, and so yeah,
that's the only person that's a lif Now at this point,
Victor's like, ooh, you Sonovich and he goes after the creature, right,
So now Victor wants revenge. He chases the creature and
he follows him and follows him and follows him for

(10:12):
months and eventually leads him to the Arctic, and at
some point in time, Victor is trying to walk across
like a pretty large field or you know, spread of ice,
and he passes out. He basically like passes out from
exhaustion hypothermia because it's the Arctic, and so a ship
comes in saves him, and he retells this whole story

(10:32):
to the ship crew and in all those folks, and
then he dies on the ship, but the creature jumps
onto the ship. He boards the ship, and he is
very very sad that Victor is gone because he has
a very complex emotional relationship with Victor. He's mad at him,
he's mad at humanity, but he also loves him and
sees him as like a father type of figure and
the person that could have you know, given him all

(10:54):
these things. And he tells the crew, you know what,
this is a real bummer. I'm gonna go and I'm
gonna burn myself alive on a pyre. And then he
just leaves the ship and that's the end of the book.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, I mean, real, uh it, real downer, real downer,
really tragic. But man, what just incredibly constructed story. To
think through all of these plot elements, and honestly, I
think this is where we get to move to the
next interesting point, which is understanding how this story came

(11:24):
to be, which was not with the help of ads.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Interesting note though, before we dive into more of the
history behind the story, is commenting on our ads because
we do not choose our ads here, and we found
out that we sometimes get ads we would definitely not choose.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, so hopefully that wasn't like a pro life ad
because that happened in our Hell episode ironically. Yeah, if
you're listening and you hear an ad that you don't
think aligns with our values as a podcast, please let
us know so we can adjust that and make sure
that we don't allow that to happen if we can. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yeah. Victor Frankenstein, he wanted to he was pro life
and then he created a monster and then it was
like not pro.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
Life he was.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Maybe that's what the He was pro life and the
creature for the story.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, yeah, it was a pro life. It was a
pro life allegory, except the creature became pro choice and
decided that he was kind of choose to remove people
from this planet.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So anyway, just wanted to note that
about ads. Okay, so let's get into the interesting lore
behind this story because, as I said at the top,
I think this is really fascinating. Yeah, so, as many
of us know, people listeners us Mary Shelley, the author
of this tale, She was actually only eighteen years old

(12:52):
at the time of writing this story. Now, to be fair,
in eighteen eighteen, this would be like being forty five
years old today, like half way through life.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Just kidding.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
There are actually a lot of considerations around like length
of life at this time, but eighteen, like that's just
how much experience could you have had at that point.
That's pretty impressive.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
I definitely did not write a best selling novel by
the time I was eighteen years old. No, no, no,
but we digressed. I was writing bad poetry when I
was eighteen. Yeah, So it's important to though. Mary Shelley too,
like grew up in a kind of an interesting space.
Her mama died during childbirth or like just after childbirth,
so she never knew her mom, and then her dad
was I believe, a philosopher, and then her stepmom was

(13:32):
a scientist as well or something like that. There was
like she was surrounded by like science, and that's going
to be critically important for understanding why she wrote the
way that she wrote so it was kind of just
kind of a cool thing. So she actually began writing
the story in during the Year Without Summer, and what
ends up happening is in eighteen sixteen, there are these
huge climate abnormalities that resulted in significant global temperature drops.

(13:55):
They resulted in crop failures and food shortages across Europe
and the northern Hemisphere.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
Really there's a lot of problems for folks. And it
was the equivalent of what could be described as a
volcanic winter, primarily due to a volcanic eruption. So there
was the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. It was
the large eruption at that time in over thirteen hundred
years and actually directly impacted climate in northern Hemisphere. So
the Year without Summer was basically just saw cold, like

(14:20):
lots of cold times that were like much colder temperatures
than they were used to.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
I think that we discussed this eruption during our episode
on like End of Days, Yeah, sort of interpretations and predictions. Yeah,
like this was a big deal, Like it had people
really scared because they really didn't understand weather at all
in the eighteen hundreds, Like it was pretty mystical and unpredictable,
and like they tried to they were like trying to

(14:45):
track patterns of weather, but that was about as precise
as they were getting. Is like, around this time last year,
we had rain, so maybe we'll have raining in this year.
But then you have these anomalies like a volcano erupting
that completely disrupt things. And they're like, this is the end.
We are at rapture. Note yeah, not to be too topical,

(15:07):
I guess, but anyway, yeah, it was.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
It was a big deal.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
So this event happens and Mary Shelley and her friends
they're like having this very weird summer. They ended up
being stuck inside during their visit to Lord Byron in
the Swiss Alps in eighteen sixteen, and because there was
no summer because it was cold because the volcanic ash
had essentially blocked the sun from reaching the planet very effectively,

(15:31):
the weather was too cold for them to enjoy the outdoors,
so instead they remained indoors and they had this sort
of competition sort of thing. I mean, not a directly competition,
but it was more of a like, let's challenge each
other to write stories, and they took turns reading ghost
stories from the Book of Phantasmagoriana, which led to a
proposal from Lord Byron, let's all write scary ghost story

(15:54):
and John Pilladori, one of the members of Lord Byron Society,
would go on to write The Vampire, which serves as
one of the most influential volumes in the lore of
the vampire genre.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
Yeah, so for those of you who have never read
Chuck Pallinook or Poloniak or however you might say his name,
CHUCKI p Chuckie p you know, author of Fight Club
and Choke and Invisible Monsters and all that. The collection
of short stories that he did called Haunted is based
on this event. It's a group of authors that got
together that were dared to write the scariest story. And

(16:25):
that's what Haunted is. It's like all the authors writing
their scary stories. So it's like this story itself is
like a very influential story for like the horror genre too,
which is really interesting. Right. So during their conversation about stories,
someone happened to mention the idea of or reanimated corpse.
And at this point in time, Mary Shelley is very nervous.
Every day they're asking or do you have a story,

(16:46):
do you have a subject? And she's like, no, I don't,
And then somebody brings up the idea of reanimating corpses,
and then Shelley has this kind of idea and she
has this on top of she wakes up from a
nightmare about this specific kind of event going on on
and so giving her kind of her interest in science
and specifically the topic of galvinism. She had an idea
and began writing the first draft of the story. If

(17:07):
you don't know what galvinism is, this is kind of
a big deal. Galvinism is how electric currents within biological
organisms are generated and related to contraction and convulsion. During
this time when Galvinism starts to kind of emerge, what
ends up happening is kind of at the time people
are discovering electricity, they're learning about electricity, and they're really
kind of learning all these things, and galvinism is completely

(17:29):
discovered by accident, which we'll talk about later. But Shelley
is really interested in that particular thing, and so the
story of Frankenstein starts to emerge.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, like the understanding of electricity had been around for
a little while, but this was pre commercialization. Yeah, like
you were not going to go into a place and
find electrical anything. Yet you had people experimenting with it.
You had sort of stories and more about it, and
you definitely had some mythical properties attributed to it. But
people did understand like, this is a power, this is

(18:00):
a force. It is real and in the world we
can see it. We can't yet harness it, not really
like kind of versions of it. We can, but we
can't necessarily. We just don't understand it very well yet.
But they did know about this this whole like view,
you can if electrical current is run through biological material,

(18:22):
it could result in contraction that material.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
And at the time too, people are looking at like
organisms moving around and be like how do they move?
Like what energizes them? So there's like looking at like
spiritual forces or had divine forces or galvanic forces.

Speaker 1 (18:39):
Or like the spark of life is what comes up
a lot and you will we'll talk about that too.
But this was before the War of Currents, right, yes, much, Yeah,
decades before before Tom Sedison started like you know, basically
using propaganda to make sure that his electricity wasn't used
for the electric chair.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yeah, yeah, and you know, before this, you know, we
we had I think I don't remember what year it
would have been, but Benjamin Franklin was like, you know,
we can use electricity to like do stuff with it,
and but like again, it just it wasn't really available yet.
The idea of it causing death was known, but the
idea of it causing life was kind of newish. But yeah, anyway,

(19:16):
that's a big a side on electricity. We're at the
point now where Shelley has been, I guess inspired by
this conversation about reanimation and galvanism, and she actually then
she the muse strikes, she gets the creative bug, and
she and she continued to write, and she had this
to say about it quote. I saw the pale student
of nhallowed arts, kneeling beside the thing he had put together.

(19:39):
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out
and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show
signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.
Frightful must it be? For supremely frightful would be the
effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism
of the creator of the world. End quotech it's it's

(20:01):
very telling. That's how she even talked about that, because again,
her writing is just so poetic. Yeah, and it's actually
kind of funny too, because in the story they really
do not elaborate very much on the process of reanimating
the corpse. All the like story and lore we get
about Frankenstein throwing the switch and harnessing lightning and like
running that to the creature. That was like an interpretation

(20:23):
of this quote. Yeah, and not directly from the story itself.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, the whole It's Alive is a dramatization
of what actually happens in the book. Yeah. More likely
what happens is Victor goes, oh, it has to run,
Like he gets real nervous, Like he's like, oh yeah,
Like he's basically like this this was a mistake, you know,
like he was not thrilled with what happened.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
No, yeah, Like immediately he's like, I was so interested
in this idea of like animating a dead thing, and
so he animates this corpse and the eyes start to
flutter open, and he's.

Speaker 1 (20:55):
Like, what have I done?

Speaker 2 (20:56):
And then but like doesn't even say anything, it's just
like sees it flutter open and pain and runs like,
there's no dialogue here, but we need we need to tell,
don't show.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
In the movies they yell what you know, he's alive?

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So at this point in time, you know,
she writes this draft and with the encouragement of her husband,
she in the unfortunate suicide of her half sister Franny,
she actually begins working on a longer novel version from
the draft. She eventually finishes the book in Bath in
eighteen sixteen, So she does. Bath is is actually one
of the settings of in the novel as well, and

(21:31):
so she does finish it at this time and starts
to kind of work out and do the editing and
stuff like that to make this like a more you know,
kind of fleshed out novel.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
And to be clear, it wasn't a bath tub. It
was the place.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
It was a city of Bath region.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
Yeah, I called Bath And there's some fun stories about that. Okay.
So uh, let's see we've gotten to the part where
she actually has gotten to the novel version of this,
and then she had to sell it, so she had
to run some ads, she.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
Act she did. There were ads for this which is great.
All right, we're back.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
We're finishing up a little bit of the story or
just the background of the story of understanding how this
novel of Frankenstein came to be. She finishes eventually finish
the story in bath in eighteen sixteen. The creature in
the story is slightly different than some interpretations in the movies.
The creature is often called Frankenstein and is sort of

(22:30):
confused for Frankenstein. It's unable to speak and moves with
like a zombie like motion. In the novel, the creature
is actually highly intelligent and verbose. It is described as
very tall and even elaborates slightly that Frankenstein made it
like very strong, but it like it feels pain, it
has experiences, it learns. It originally wakes and like there's

(22:53):
this description where for a long time it doesn't know
how to make sense of its sensory input. It's like
getting vision and here and is like doesn't really know
what that all means. And eventually it starts to like
organize itself around that stimulation and then just like watches
people to learn how to talk and eventually how to read.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yeah, in the story, he does camp out in like
a kind of like a hovel in the woods and
is watching a family. So you know, like in some
interpretations in like the classic like Boris Carlisle like adaptation
of it, where you know, he goes into the woods,
he kills the blind man, he actually actually kills the
little girl, like and it's all like a creature just
going like I'm figuring things out, what does this all mean?

(23:32):
I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a monster,
and uh. And in this one, it's like, actually, no,
like he's doing a lot of pre planning and like
and really is you know, pretty angry, but he does
like actually learn. He's reading like like Plutarch and like
all kinds of stuff that's like philosophy. He's reading like
stuff that I couldn't read, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
So basically what I'm saying is this reanimated thing is
much smarter than I am. But also I think another
interpretation too, and you'll see this in a lot in
a lot of media, is that the creature is often
depicted as like, you know, Frankenstein has gone and robbed
graves and stolen body parts and just kind of sown
random body parts together to create this thing, and that's

(24:11):
actually not what is going on like Frankenstein's monster. What
it is is like he actually cobbled together the parts
of the body using dissected inanimate tissues rather than like
specific body parts. Like he's not going and finding an arm.
He's like grabbing tissues like leftover meats and stuff from
slaughtered animals and stuff from the local slaughterhouse and whatnot.

(24:32):
So it's a little bit different than just kind of
like grave robbing and then sowing all the parts together.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, and it kind of, like you said, they don't
really elaborate very much on the process, but they kind
of allude to the idea that he sort of like used.
It's like this is one's tissue, and then he, with
the level of expert precision I don't think we could
expect from any of the world's top surgeons today, is
able to like turn this into functional joint tissue and
muscle tissue and yeah, like even like cranial, vertebral and

(25:03):
even neurological tissue. Like it's it's pretty impressive how Frankenstein,
I think greatly exceeds all known philosophy of modern technology
to put this together. Yeah, but that's okay, what does
wave our hand at it and say, like that's what
he did. It's great.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
As I was writing the notes for this, it made
me think of like how science fiction turns of science
fact very often it's true, and how like you know
a lot of times like something like this will beget
scientific questions and then like ultimately will lead to developments
based on what we can imagine, right, Like Isaac Asimov
has some of that stuff in his works where he
kind of created some ideas and then that will ended

(25:37):
up being researched. Like Star Trek is another example where
like cell phones are like a direct idea from Star Trek.
Like they were like, oh, well, what if we did
or skype in FaceTime? Right, Like video conferencing is an example.
It comes from Star Trek. They're like, I bet we
could do that. And so like I always liked the
idea of like science fiction turning the science fact like,
and this is one of those stories that does that

(25:58):
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, and some of those, like I know, there is
like a lot of sort of converging factors that led
to it and the like. There are inspirations for things, sure,
there are some that are like directly from some of
those science fiction and I forget what they are, but
it'd be fun to maybe do an episode some point
of where we talked about like fiction becomes reality because
there are somewhere Like it was really clearly this thing
would not exist without this creative, this imagining from someone else. Right,

(26:22):
it's less about them predicting the future than creating it,
which is kind of its own unique take on it.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, yeah, for sure, like that. Maybe that's a mini too.
We could just do that science fic to science faction
or something like that.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah, yeah, that'd be fun. But anyway, this all sort
of begs the question, as I said, like Victor Frankenstein's
achievement in creating a corpse from just like visceral tissue
that's found around is a pretty remarkable story. But I
think even without that level of sophistication, we can still
ask the question that I think many of us might have,
which is is it even possible to reanimate a corpse?

(26:53):
Like could we do it? And what would happen if
we did do it?

Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah? I was thinking about this too, Like, Okay, so
there's you know, there's like the practical there's practical ethical
and moral questions inside of this, but like I think
that the practical question is like can we do it?
And then my my psychology brain is like, well, what
would what would that be? What would that experience be? Like,
like what would it be like waking up like your
brain like and we can talk about that in a second,

(27:18):
but like you're you are, like you all of a
sudden achieved consciousness in a body that you don't recognize
or that is like piecemeal together. So like just like
what would that do to a person? You know? So
like I kind of want to unpack that too, But yeah,
let's talk about the science of monsters and what this
looks like. So I love this quote from Mary Shelley
in Scientific Pursuit there is continual food for discovery and

(27:41):
wonder And she says this in Frankenstein, which is like,
but she she subscribed to this idea, Like, like I said,
she grew up around scientists. She grew up in the
pursuit of knowledge. She grew up in this idea of
like learning about the world. So despite being kind of
just a you know, people think of her as like
a horror fiction author, she was somebody who was like
vast influence and interested in the workings of science at

(28:04):
the time.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, And I think you could read Frankenstein and get
from an allegory about how science is dangerous because we
overstep our bounds. But I think what she was really
trying to say is like science is amazing and wonderful
and we need to know our place in the universe
and not try to step into God's shoes. Yeah, but
not that it was anti science, although I think some

(28:26):
people will read that into it. She seemed like she
was quite interested in supporting the idea of science. But
it's sort of like, for the purposes of telling a
scary story, what if scientists went too far and they
did not think about or know their place in the world. Right,
So yeah, I mean Shelley had a great interest in
modern science while writing the novel, and so I think
in the description of animating this corpse, she's very sparing

(28:49):
with the details. So we don't know maybe what she
was alluding to, but we can ask the question like
does the science add up? And there are three things
to unpack here. There's the very most general question of
like reanimating dead tissue, but there is also an important
part and we kind of covered this and we did
an episode a long time ago of like would a
head transplant work? Yeah, and that it's like re establishing

(29:11):
brain and nerve connections, because the issue with a brain
transplant I think that people aren't considering or head transplant
is like reconnecting those millions of neurons to the spine
and the muscle tissue and like having that work somehow,
like in the movie get Out for example, Like would
that actually work?

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Right?

Speaker 2 (29:28):
It would require a level of expert precision not currently
capable to us, right anyway, So that's the second thing.
So the three things ranimating dead tissue, re establishing brain
nerve connections, and the psychology of being a dead brain
that's now in a new reanimated body.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, complex, complex moral and ethical questions, right.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, and like just pragmatic practical question.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Pragmatic Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, And just to kind of
like lay the groundwork right now, like is widely accepted
that something like a brain trans plant or you know,
like like we talked about in that episode of body
transplant full body transplant, the idea is that we just
don't have the technology to do it, right, Like that's
like current status twenty twenty five. We don't have it

(30:11):
let alone eighteen eighteen, So just I think at the
time it's recording, maybe next year we'll have this option.
Who knows, because this timeline is absolutely absurd. So but
I do think it's important to start with kind of
like where this idea of using electricity to reanimate like
reanimate tissue comes from. And that goes back to what
we talked about earlier, which was galvinism. So galvinism found

(30:32):
its footing like before Mary Shelley started writing this, and
it kind of started with this idea. William Abernathy, which
is just such a seventeen hundreds eighteen hundreds name, and
William Lawrence. There were two folks often debating the idea
of the life principle, and Abernathy argued that life was
a kind of spark, and so you'll see how the
metaphor of electricity shows up, right. So Abernathy argued that

(30:54):
that life was a kind of spark that was added
to tissue, really important here, while Lawrence argued that life
existed within the body itself, so like it didn't it
didn't you didn't add the spark. The spark was already
there in the biology. And so that was actually kind
of like a big ongoing debate that Mary Shelley found
really interesting and actually super influential when kind of putting

(31:15):
together the idea of how to bring the creature to life.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Sure, and then you pair this ongoing debate with the
discovery and the sort of advances in the ability to
harness electricity and even create electricity, and you essentially have
the perfect intersection of science and the un answered questions.
Luigi Galvani was a surgeon at the University of Bologna, Bologna.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Bolooney, I was just saying the University of Bologne, which
is a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
Okay, that was just me though, So yes, that's a
very very fair point. Was the surge of the university
at Bolognay not to be confused with Trump University, I
mean Bologna, Bologna University. During a dissection of a frog
near a static electricity machine, he accidentally touched the frog's leg,
resulting in a brief shock that caused the frog's leg
to twitch. Hence tissue was now moving seemingly on its own,

(32:02):
having been giving a spark a tickle of electricity.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
Yeah, that goes to the abernathy argument that right, that
like life is the spark that's added to the tissue,
and like you could see how somebody would go see
see and that's how you know that happens. But like
you know, obviously we know something different. But like this
was at the time, this was dubbed animal electricity, and
Galvani began to experiment with tissues and electricity, which eventually
led to the development of the theory of bioelectricity. This

(32:30):
is something it came down the pike later. Now Galvani's
nephew took it a step further and began applying his
work to human corpses. If you ever want to read
really great science on human corpses and research and stuff
like this and where it comes from, check out Stiff
by Mary Roach. Like there's some really cool stuff in there,
and they do kind of mention some of this a
little bit.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Bonus recommend number two.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, I love it. And this was the idea that
this specific idea that Galvani's nephew had, which was applying
electricity to human corpses, it gave Shelley the idea for
the what was called the spark of being, which is
specifically reference in the book, and the spark of being
is used to bring the creature to life in the
story of the Novelzation.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah, so, okay, we are not neuroscientists, but we're going
to just do a brief sort of review here, which
is that thinking about the neuroscience of this whole thing,
we really need to remember that the brain is as
weird and it's complex, and there are kind of two
major issues. The brain that is used is not a
living brain, and the connections to the brain for the

(33:29):
nervous system are severed, and those two things pose pretty
insurmountable problems because brain tissue famously does not last very
long without the life sustaining support that keep it going.
It needs blood, it needs oxygen, it needs to be protected,
and it sort of needs continual input and use with

(33:50):
periodic opportunities for rest. And if those processes are interrupted,
the brain becomes a lump of meat that is capable
of nothing anymore, kind of like.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
What happens when you listen into ads. Okay, so we're
back and we're talking about this idea of the brain
being this thing that is really complex and basically a
lump of meat when you lose all of its connections
and all of it's like life sustaining properties. Now I

(34:20):
read something really interesting that I want to drop in
real quick here is that in the context of brain
slash full body transplants, when we were kind of talking
about that, some people like truly believe that the brain
was immune to the rejection process, the organ rejection process
compared to other organs. They're like, yeah, the brain can't
get rejected. Well, I laughed because I was reading it.

(34:42):
I was like, well, I reject my brain all the time.
I'm like, man, You're like, you know, I do that.
So it's it's one of those things where it's like,
I don't think the words. I think that we still
are at the very like the fringe of understanding how
all this works, right sure, which I think brings us
to the question of like, can we even reanimate a brain,
given that the tissue is dead, that it's that's lost
its blood flow, that it's lost all these things, can

(35:02):
we even reanimate that? Well, some researchers in twenty nineteen
were able to take pig brains and restore some cellular
functioning following their slaughter, or at least that's kind of
what they were arguing they were able to kind of
see this, this kind of this functioning going on, and
this didn't represent full brain activity or anything close to
activity that could be linked to consciousness. It did help
us learn that cellular activity does not immediately cease after

(35:25):
death and can be replenished or revived to some small
degree under very particular conditions. Right, so, like we are
like on the cusp of going, Hey, the minute that
you die doesn't mean that all of your cells stop
working right then, and there we know a little bit
more that like, yeah, there's a little bit of continued
activity past that point of when somebody is pronounced dead.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Yeah, they break down slowly over time, but a lot
of the primary functionality is gone. And you know, I
like to think about the sort of analogical comparison to
something like when you have the flu and your body
temperature actually gets really really high that can literally cook
your neurons. Yeah, and a lot of I think doctors

(36:07):
have compared this to cooking an egg, and it's like
once they're cooked and like the proteins are like are
untangled and retangled together in new ways. There's no undoing
that you cannot uncook an egg. So like once the mechanism,
the sort of biological pieces that are required for brain

(36:28):
to function start to break down, there's really no putting
them back together. They're they're broken. Now they're onto the
new stage of matter, which is decayed matter. Yeah, and
that's that's where our FK junior is now. It's it's
no longer functioning material. It's just decayed matter up there.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Just decayed matter. And I think this is actually a
really important point because we're talking about like brain cells
in like the features of specific brain cells and all that,
but also nerve cells and like how nerve cells actually operate,
which gets us to the next point here.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, so regarding reattaching the nerve system. So we already
have the problem of the brain and like I guess
and versions of this, it's sort of been reanimated, although
not completely. You've got to attach that to something. A
brain without sensory input or any motors to coordinate does
literally nothing right. It's like the brain the jar. Yeah,
it's a place where all the things are connected, but
nothing's connected to anything else. It's just a bundle. It's

(37:21):
like that when you put a bunch of charge cords
in your bag and you pull them out and they're
just all wound together. They're not charging anything. Yeah, they're
just all in a big bundle. They're a big knot.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, it's all chords, no dongles.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
So anyway, nerve cells are some of the most difficult
to treat because they don't repair themselves like other selves.
And an additional challenge face with a full brain transplant
is also this issue of rejection as you were talking about,
and nervous cells are critical for acceptance of a new organ.
If the primary driver for the central nervous system is
rejected by its own system, then you have a pretty

(37:55):
unique problem. Now, does this mean will never crack the code?
Not necessary, But there we certainly were. We weren't there now,
and we certainly weren't there in eighteen eighteen, over two
centuries ago.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
Right, And for those of you who are listening and
going like, well, you know, they're creating different things where
we can bypass certain nerve systems and stuff like that. Sure,
like there are things that are happening that we are
using electricity to like help move prosthetics and things like that,
but we're really not at the stage where we can
reattach nerve cells and like make them operate the same
way that they could before, not consistently at least, And

(38:31):
so that's I think critically important. Now let's talk about
the psychology part of this, because we are a psychology podcast,
and there is a really interesting discussion about nature versus
nurture given the issue that Victor abandoned his creature and
the creature faced innumerable rejections throughout its entire lifespan, which
was very short, true, right, So so throughout the book
you see that like this thing only wants love, and

(38:52):
it's constantly rejected, constantly punished, constantly called a freak, constantly
called these things like these names, and like people are
afraid of it. So you can kind of make this
argument to like, oh, yeah, this person's experience is pretty terrible,
so you could see how they would learn to kind
of maybe engage in some more abbarent behaviors, you know.
I think there's a question that comes up is like
would the creature have killed had it felt more love

(39:13):
or had companionship? And I don't know that's a fair
question because people kind of have all these unique learning
histories and whatnot. But we do know that the creature
was born with certain behaviors and that it learned throughout
the story. So it sounds like a little bit of nature,
a little bit of nurture, kind of like what we
understand of science today and human behavior, so it's bound
to kind of gain skills. I mean, it learned language,

(39:34):
which is learned behavior, but it feels pain, which it
was born with. So it's a little bit of both.
And I think that when we talk about those things,
we know that it's like human behavior and creature behavior
in general is a combination of nature and nurture.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
I've gotten this question before when teaching undergrad psychology, and
I think it's a great question. It's sort of like,
are there people out there who would have become serial killers?
But they never they didn't grow up an environment that
resulted in those behaviors. If you take terrible people throughout history,
like let's just say Hitler, if Hitler had been raised
and in some environment that was that taught compassion and

(40:10):
respect for all religions and nationalities and faiths and skin
colors and was empathetic, like, would he have turned out
to be the horrible genocidal maniac that he that he
turned out to be? And I think that we would, generally,
with our philosophy of life, understand that they almost certainly
would have turned out different. At the very least their

(40:31):
paths would have taken some like somewhat to different outcomes.
Whether or not it was drastically different, we don't know.
Like who they would have ultimately been would have been
at least somewhat different. And it's very reasonable to think, like,
and the answer I've given to that question of like,
are there are serial killers people that could have had
normal lives? Like could Alex Jones have turned out to

(40:52):
be a good person if he had been raised the
right way? And I think that, like optimistically and with
the philosophy and understanding of the in's a behavior that
I have, I think the answer is yes, Like, if
you have an appropriate environment that supports the development of
appropriate behaviors, you would get those people like they would
have turned out to be different people like Trump could

(41:13):
have been a different person, Like could have been a
good person. RFK Junior could have been a good person.
I mean, now his brain is a reanimated scrambled egg,
but like he could have been a good person before
that happened. Yeah, And so yeah, I think that that
it's reasonable concluded that could have been the case. But yeah,
we ultimately will never know because it's it's like that
isn't what happened. All we have is what did actually happen?

(41:35):
Like it really was this this creature that would just
faced so much constant punishment and extinction and so little
compassion or opportunity to thrive. And it's like anybody else
in that situation would also turn out to be like
just a horrible, terrible jd vance or something. Yeah, exactly,
We've seen it happen time. You know, there's one as
vice president right now, so yeah, or a Ron DeSantis

(41:57):
or a Greg Gabbott, like any one of those terrible
people who say life and like is clearly a monstrosity
that was designed by an environment that creates monstrosities. Yeah,
So anyway, that's.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
All that, that's the science of that.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Yeah, But how would someone react if they woke up
from a brain transplant, since technically a brain transplant would
also be considered a body transplant based on the current
belief that the identity of a person is in the brain,
then it would be like waking up in a different body. Probably,
we don't, you know, we don't fully know. Yeah, great, Yeah,
but there would be related adjustments from simple things like

(42:33):
high orientation and more complex things like not recognizing your
own face or new sensations.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
You'll likely have different sensory inputs.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
And like it's actually not unrelated to another topic we're
going to be doing for our final Halloween episode, which
is Halloween Masks. Yeah, and how we think and behave
differently when we're wearing a mask. And it's somewhat spoiler alert,
but like think about the fact that, like that changes
how you interact with the world. So if you're wearing
a completely different body, that's also going to change how

(43:03):
you interact with the world and how the world reacts
to you. Yeah, And so I think it's reasonable consider that, like,
while you might retain some of the physical things that
made up you, your experience is going to be pretty
much very different right from the get.

Speaker 1 (43:18):
Go, Right, and at the end of the day, we
just don't know, Like we don't know because we've just
never that's uncharted territory. Like we can assume based on
what we understand of like how we perceive the world,
how we might react in a new body, but we
just don't know and we're really not even that close
to it. I mean the closest I could see would
be like maybe something like virtual reality, but like that's

(43:39):
not quite the same because you're it's just a new
environment with new like something that you're kind of observing
with still the same sensations of the body that you're in,
right like you are absorbing that information through your current
body that you have grown up in. So I do
think that we just don't know what that's going to be,
what that's going to be like, and I don't I
think that we can make some get but we'll never

(44:00):
know until we start exploring that and really doing the
science behind it.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Assume that's like a mantle anyone wants to pick up
and try and run with, you know, right, like, this
may not be an area that receives very much funding
your attention because it's it is a tough sell, I think,
but you know, thinking about like Futurama, there are going
to be people who are like I'm okay with being
ahead in a jar, like sure, let's uh yeah, keep

(44:25):
me keep me going, I'll just keep doing this thing forever.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Yeah, or or you have experiences like if you know,
people like an avatar where it's like okay, so like
you know, you could kind of talk about, like, you know,
the utility of something like this, like you could see,
you know, just like from the optimistic standpoint, like this
could help resolve a lot of things if we're able
to get to this point. But we're not close. We're
not close to like transferring consciousness into other bodies or

(44:49):
into computers. We're not at the level of transferring into
you know, like we're just not there yet. We still
can't repair the nervous system, let alone take an entire
person's like awareness of put it in a different vessel. Like,
we're just not there.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
It's true, but I think you've talked me into the
fact that maybe there's enough of a market for it
that people might be actively working on that problem. So
here's an advertisement for transferring your consciousness into a potato.
All right, We do have some more interesting tidbits for

(45:24):
you about the story. So again, in case we got
so far off track that you forgot what we were
talking about. We're talking about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the story
of reanimating a corpse. That's just a tragic tale and
many people will have asked the question, well, but what
about igor or igor depending on what persuasion you are from?
And anyway, this was totally a made up addition. It

(45:48):
was added to media representations of Frankenstein and didn't show
up until the nineteen thirty nine movie Son of Frankenstein
and other adaptations. The assistant was named Fritz instead. In
the story, there is no assistant. Frankenstein acts alone, which
is actually kind of important to the story because Frankenstein
is alone in his inner turmoil at fretting over the

(46:11):
problems wrought by his creation.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's kind of walking around internally going home. Man,
oh man, what am I gonna do?

Speaker 2 (46:20):
Yeah? Yeah, it's like legitimately a good chunk of the story.
He's just like, oh yeah, so terrible.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
He's like, I just laid there sick for months, so
just so worried about this.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's great now, Frankenstein. The story
actually has an anti death penalty commentary, and it is
used as an example against the death penalty in general.
Right here's how so specifically, they there's a storyline where
somebody is framed for a murder and put to death
as a result of this, it's Frankenstein's creature, by the way,

(46:50):
is the thing that murdered something somebody else. And then
so the monster kills somebody and then framed somebody else,
and that person who was framed it's put to death
and then it's discovered later that the person is innocent,
and so there is like that kind of like anti
death penalty metaphor there, but there's also an adam metaphor
here as quote unquote God Frankenstein creates the first man

(47:13):
in the creature, so like there's kind of like there's
a lot of like religious allegory and stuff like that too,
which is really powerful.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
Yeah, and then like man has the sort of the
the opportunity for good and then commit sin and then
the sort of like in just the evil trajectory at
that point. So yeah, it is clever in the way
that she wrote that, And yeah, I think it is
really abundantly clear the tragedy of losing the sort of
childhood friend who is framed for murder of his brother

(47:39):
and then only to find out that that person and
you're thinking the whole time, well, if you had just
not put that person to death, like if the guilt
of the person was in question pretty much the entire time,
and then they coerce a confession, and of course a
coerced confession at that time, and I mean even still,
but definitely at that time was considered like, well, no
one's gonna lie about this, that's definitely right, right. And

(47:59):
speaking of which, we did an episode on false confessions.
You can go back and check out.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
Anyway, they co es your confession, and so this person's
put to death, and like, if this person had just
been like put in jail, they would have been exonerated. Yeah,
but no, the knee jerk reaction is like, we've decided
on death. That's happening tomorrow, and like this very expedient
process of what I would call mob justice in this
particular case. But anyway, in the original novel, the creature
is vegetarian. Interestingly, despite eventually murdering some people, this creature

(48:28):
pretty much only eats berries that they find in the woods.
And so there's practical reasons, but there's also some ethical reasons.
The creature is actually kind of frightened by and disgusted
by violence and death that is, from hunting or even
slaughtering animals, and so it refrains from eating, like seeking
that out as a source of food.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty reasonable about it. It's like the berries
and the things that I find will give me somethingance.
This works in that. This is plenty yeah, yeah, and
that's kind of cool. The story is very popular. I mean,
if you are listening to this and you have never
read the book, you know who Frankenstein's moss is. You
know what he looks like. Oftentimes people think of the
universal monster, which is the porest carlisle one, the green head,

(49:06):
the flat top, the stitches across the forehead and the
neck of the bolts on the neck and all that. Yeah,
the thing is like that's the most popular. But there
are over four hundred feature films. There's four hundred and
thirty to date as of September. Easy number that we
know about. Four hundred and thirty five feature films, one
hundred and thirty ninety I'm sorry, one hundred and ninety
three short films, and three hundred and thirty two TV

(49:28):
series that share some version of the creature. But the
first film adaptation was almost one hundred years after the
book was written, and it was a short film in
nineteen ten and.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
Of course, part of the reason we were inspired to
be talking about that is because just a short time
from the release of this episode, Gillermo del Toro was
releasing his treatise on Frankenstein, Yeah, which looks absolutely incredible.
I have tremendous respect for Guillermo del Toro as a
as a writer, a director, and a producer, and I

(49:58):
am very optimistic this movie is going to be possibly
the definitive Frankenstein story. I'm not sure how close it's
going to be to the original story, but I think
it's going to be closer than most modern tellings have been.
So I'm very excited to see how it goes. But
the another thing you'll see in reading the book is
that the original monster as written was not green. Frankenstein

(50:20):
is frequently depicted in green, but instead if you think
about sort of a old flesh, it actually is much
particularly if it's from like a Caucasian persuasion, it's yellow.
And so the monsters described as having sort of yellowish
skin with long flowing black hair, and these just perfect
chick lit like teeth that she didn't call them chicklets
because that was nothing back then, but just these perfect teeth.

(50:41):
So yeah, it was kind of a it was a
pretty different description, not like so different, like it was
still described as very tall and like coupled together from
very bit like the monsters, very frightening to people. And
that's why they react to him in the way that
they do. It's because he looks like a corpse brought
to life, like discolored and its eyes are yellow and

(51:02):
all that. But but for some reason it just became
depicted as green and most common popular representations.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
Yeah, and depicted as green and also depicted as like
non like just not talking. In many of the other descriptions.
They use an abnormal brain. That's what they do, like
instead of like you know what they do in the book,
which is just like they get all the best parts
over two years. So like I think it's like I
think there is like an it's an interesting depiction, you know,
to make him more of a I guess, more of

(51:30):
a monster than like a human. That's just kind of like,
hey man, life sucks, you know, yeah, absolutely absolutely all right.

Speaker 2 (51:37):
But I think that is what I have to say
about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I think this is uh I
as I said, I think this is one of my
favorite horror stories, like horror books. I think it's incredibly
well written. It's a strong recommend. If you haven't checked
it out, you can probably find it for like free
e books or like extremely cheap but used bookstores, or

(51:58):
even extremely cheap and like rey bookstores. You can go
pick one out, Like the copies are probably only going
to be like five or six dollars because seriously, it's
well outside of copy like intellectual copyright at this point.
But it is an amazing well written, beautiful story. It's tragic,
it's haunting. It's not very long, like it says, this
is only a couple hundred pages. I think, yeah, And
I think you could read it and just you know,

(52:20):
if you really wanted to on a weekend pretty easily, yeah,
or over the course of a week. But yeah, just
a really good story.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
It's one of my favorite books I've ever read. Like
it truly is like I generally avoid some classics because
sometimes they're like I don't really like the way that
it's written, Like I liked Dracula, but I didn't love
Dracula because it's written in a different format. But like
Frankenstein is truly it's a quick read. It's a beautiful read.
It keeps you on your toes and it's just it's
truly one of the best books I've ever read. It is.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah, it's really incredible. So all right, I think that's
what I have to say about that. If you would
like to support our podcast doing our thing, then you
should join us over on Patreon. If you do that,
you'll get ad free content, bonus content, early content, all
that kind of thing, and possibly the moment more importantly,
at the end of our full length discussions, I give
an active shout out thank you to all of the

(53:07):
people who help us be a podcast. So thank you
so much to Mike, Mmegan, Mike t, Justin, Kim Brad, Stephanie, Brian, Ashley,
Kiara and Charlie. Thank you for continuing to help us
be a show. We really really appreciate it and it
really helps us continue to do this things seriously. And yeah,
it's it is not free to make this podcast. We

(53:27):
have to pay for a bunch of stuff, so their
generosity helps us do that. And you could you could
join that list too, and I will also read your
name if you'd like to tell us your thoughts about
the Mary Shelley's Frankenstein add any more interesting tidbits or
correct something that we got wrong. We love hearing from people.
We're also very good with heaping amounts of praise. You
can email us that praise directly at info wwdwwdpodcast dot com.

(53:51):
He can leave us a rating and review like subscribe,
and of course telling a friend. Word of mouth is
a really important way that we spread podcasts around and
all that stuff helps us out. And we're also on
the social media platforms you can reach us. There those
kind of a mix of like how to reach us
and how to support us, but they're related. Yeah, they're there.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
Yeah, and we love all of it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
Yeah. Thank you so much to my team of people
without whom I could not make this show writing and
fact checking from Shane and myself. Thank you so much
for recording with me today and for putting together the
notes on this topic.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Shane, Hey, anytime. This was a fun one.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
It really was. Our social media coordinator is Emma Wilson,
and our audio engineer producer who makes these podcasts listenable
and good is Justin who does a lot of hard
work and we make his job too difficult, but he's
really really good at what it does.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
We do. I feel so bad for Justin because of
our nonsense.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yes, but we're actually not done yet. We like to
recommend things. Do you have anything to add before we
get to our recommendations?

Speaker 1 (54:50):
No, I do not.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Did you notice I said the word add?

Speaker 1 (54:53):
I did boo?

Speaker 2 (55:03):
All right, Well, back from that ad break, and we're
gonna cue the music for some recommendations.

Speaker 1 (55:08):
Yay, recommendations. I'm gonna go first.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
I've been recommending a bunch of books and I'm just
gonna do that thing again. I just finished another book
that I was reading. This is a book called war
Breaker by Brandon Sanderson. This is sort of an earlier
book in his canon and his entry here. This does
fall into what is called the Cosmere. So sort of
like Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson writes these novels that all

(55:41):
sort of participate in the same universe. They're interconnected in
some way, and like you can read it and not
know anything about that universe and totally follow the story,
but if you read other books, you'll sort of see
little pieces that tie them all together. Yeah, and there's
like a bigger story that contains them. In Stephen King's
uni verse that's the Dark Tower, but in Brandon Sanderson

(56:03):
it is this god called atyl Nauseum and the Cosmer
where you have there are a couple characters who will
show up across these different stories, sure, and then these
other like godlike characters that are a breakoff of that
original big god thing. So anyway, war Breaker is a
really fun story. It is I wonder how to describe this.

(56:27):
It is a fantasy story set in a world where
people can take other people's breath and use that breath
to animate things to do work for them. They can
animate in animate objects like cloth, a rope. They can
also reanimate corpses, which is relevant to our story today
and turn them into soldiers. And they can reanimate pretty

(56:47):
much anything that has solid material. So that's part of it.
But the more breath you take from other living people
and beings and creatures, the more powerful you are, and
you essentially can reach like a like status. As a
matter of fact, people who die heroically will return as
like these these revenant gods that are sustained through crazy

(57:08):
amounts of breath. Sure, and the whole book is sort
of a lead up to sort of a war between
these two nations and just a lot of really cool
character development. So it's a really fun fantasy story. As
I said, it sort of exists in that cosmeir realm.
But I really enjoyed it, and I recommend people who
are interested in checking out Brandon Sanderson. It's actually a
really good starting point. This might be a place where

(57:30):
you want to jump in because it's earlier in the series,
Like a lot of the established lore isn't really something
you would need to know to be able to follow
this story. Yeah, and if you did want to read
more Cosmeer books, more of the characters from this story
are in those, and those characters and those other stories
are not in this because this one's early, So if
you were going to check it out, this is a

(57:50):
good place to start.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
Cool. I love it. I love it. You know you
always bring up Brandon Sanderson. I still have not found
like an entry point. I think Wheel of Time is
the one that everybody talks so, like, I need that's
I think that's going to be like my entry to
his world.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
But well, and that that wasn't his he uh, that
was started by Robert Jordan, but Robert Jordan passed away
he finished. Yeah, and so Brandon Sanderson helped write the
end of that stories. That is one of the things
that launched him into like major awareness and sort of
fantasy reader realm. And I love that series tremendously. It's
probably my favorite series, but it's not actually part of

(58:26):
any of like Brandon Sanders, that's universe.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
Yeah sure, okay, okay, I got you, I got you? Cool?
All right? So he brought up Stephen King. So and
it is spooky season, so that's perfect. And I went
and saw a movie yesterday that is based on Stephen
king book called The Long Walk.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
Oh this looks good.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Oh my lord. So here's the thing about Stephen King
that I don't think people realize. There's two things. One
people just don't realize that Stephen King will take some
random idea and write an entire story about it, like
Everything's Eventual, as an example of a short story that
he wrote, and I want to kind of like, I'm
this is gonna take me a minute to lands, okay,
so just bear with me. So Everything's Eventual is about it,

(59:08):
like is written about a story where Stephen King saw
a man just dumping change into a sewer. Green Okay,
he saw some guy doing that, and he was like,
under what conditions would somebody do that? And then he
wrote a whole story saying that this guy was doing
it because he was contracted by a government agency because
of his psychic powers. His psychic powers can be that
he writes a symbol on something and that symbol does
whatever it is, and he was being used to assassinate people.

(59:30):
He was given a certain allowance and he couldn't keep
the allowance for the next week. So what he would
do is he would take whatever leftover change he had
at the end of the week and he would dump
it into the drain. That's that's how Stephen King weave
the story around this, right.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
Well, what an elaborate way to like think through that.

Speaker 1 (59:46):
Right. So the reason I say that is because when
you hear about the Long Walk, it is basically it
sounds like this. It's a competition where people walk and
if you stop walking, you die, And that is the
co of the story, except that it's based in a
world where it's like a major capitalist world where the

(01:00:06):
walk is like a symbolic thing that increases productivity and
fights laziness. But it is people dying along the way,
and that's the story the whole movie is they start
walking and they do not stop. There can only be
one winner in this competition, and what is beautiful. But
it sounds like if for some people would be like
that sounds like a boring movie. It is beautiful. It

(01:00:30):
is all about like it's a joke of like, it's
not about the walk, it's the friends we made along
the way. And that's truly what it is. It's like
people connecting as humans along this walk, Like they're connecting
as people. They're joking with each other, they're trying to
support each other and how humanity always kind of rises
to the occasion when things are tough, like it is
really truly a beautiful bit of work. Now, the cast

(01:00:53):
is really interesting. Mark Hamill is the major he's the
villain in this, which is great. Whoa because Mark Hamill
was yeah yeah. But the rest of the cast is
a bunch of kind of like newer actors. Cool. There's
Cooper Hoffman, who is Philip Seymour Hoffman's son, which is
he's he's great and it he's the main character. David
Johnson he played the android in Alien Romulus. Oh okay,

(01:01:16):
and he is really good. He is the best thing
about this whole movie. He is just incredible the entire time.
And there's just a bunch of people that are in
it that are just really really good, like kind of
like up and coming actors, lots of representation, which is
cool too, and just it answers all of the practical
things that you would think would happen along the walk,

(01:01:36):
like how does somebody use the restroom? Answers that question
pretty easily. What happens when people start getting delirious and
dehydrated or they're sick? That Like, it answers every single
question you could think of about the logistics of a
long walk like this, Wow, and it's just sleep deprivation.
What do we do? Okay, there's a whole thing for
that too. So it's incredible. Strong recommend to go read it.

(01:01:57):
And it's perfect for spooky season because it's like violent
and thriller but not too scary like and it's super accessible.
It's really really good.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Wow. All right, I was curious about this one that
that was a really intense sell, so I'm interested to
check it out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
So again, that is a war Breaker a book novel
by Brandon Sanderson, and The Long Walk a new movie
that is based off of us Stephen King's story, so
if you want to check those out. But of course
there's also Frankenstein, which is just a really good book
which we recommend. So yes, I think that is all
we have to say, Thank you so much for listening.
Anything else you want to add, Nope, that's it all right.

(01:02:32):
Then this is Abraham and this is Shane. We're out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
See it. You've been listening to Why We Do What
We Do.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
You can learn more about this and other episodes by
going to WWD WWD.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you
have an awesome day.

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