Charles Liu

You're exactly right, Matt.

And we laugh to some extent, right?

You can pray on them in your comedy shows, right?

And you make people laugh at themselves, at the kinds of things that we hold in our bodies that are not physics, that are not scientific, and yet they rule our lives.

And so there is nothing wrong with something that's unscientific, right?

Like a ghost idea or a monster idea.

It's only when you are trying to use that in a negative way or to control or to be otherwise whatever negative toward people that those monsters become truly monstrous.

But it would have to have agency.

When we first thought of black holes, we thought that they were like...

you know, ooh, scary.

But now it's just like, oh, it's a monster like Cookie, right?

Yeah.

Don't lift a lid.

You'll get eaten.

But there's a litany of science fiction stories, movies, books, novels, et cetera, that had black holes as evil, scary places for a long, long time.

And then now they're benign.

Not so much anymore.

Because we fully understand them.

Because we understand them.

And so the best way, I think, to help us all deal with the monstrous ideas or fears in our lives is just to learn more about them.