We have a special prompt today from Tim Shortnap — he wrote in after an earlier episode about growing up with a chronically unhappy parent, and he pointed to something that I think is going to land for a lot of people. His parent didn't just carry unhappiness around the house. She had — has — a lifelong habit of making cruel, cutting remarks about virtually everyone. The doctor is incompetent, the neighbor is malicious, the relative is secretly scheming, and eventually Tim himself gets cast as some kind of disappointment, all of it framed as tough love. What he's asking about is what that does to a kid's brain — growing up in a world where, according to the person you depend on most, everyone is nice on the surface but bitter and two-faced behind your back. And he's particularly interested in how you tackle this cognitively, because understanding the pattern and actually evolving out of it are not the same thing.
And one of the manifestations he names is this deep-seated need for privacy — not the healthy kind where you have boundaries, but the kind where being known by anyone feels like handing them a weapon. He says it outright: privacy became a defense posture. And he's right that it stymies growth, because people connect by expressing themselves, by being seen. So the question is, how do you unlearn a worldview that was installed before you had the cognitive tools to question it?
The thing is, it's not paranoia. That's what I want to name right at the top. When you grow up with a parent who conducts a running character assassination of everyone in her orbit, you're not irrationally afraid of people — you're pattern-matching on a skewed sample. The data set you were trained on says people are secretly hostile. The problem isn't that your brain drew the wrong conclusion from the evidence. It's that the evidence was curated by someone whose own filter was broken.
That's such an important distinction. This isn't a disorder that sprang up out of nowhere — it's an adaptive response to a closed information environment. The child has no counter-evidence. If every dinner table conversation for eighteen years is a post-mortem on someone's moral failings, you don't develop a nuanced theory of mind. You develop a schema where the default assumption is that people are performing niceness while hiding contempt.
That schema has a name in the clinical literature, or at least a close cousin. Researchers talk about the "hostile attribution bias" — the tendency to interpret ambiguous social cues as threatening. But what Tim's describing is more specific than that. It's not just that he expects hostility. It's that he expects duplicity. The surface is always a lie. And that's a direct inheritance from a parent who modeled exactly that — performative politeness in public, scalpel in private.
Which creates this impossible double-bind for the kid. You learn two contradictory lessons simultaneously. Lesson one: people are dangerous and will betray you, so guard yourself. Lesson two: you must perform niceness on the surface because that's what the social world demands. So you grow up split — pleasant exterior, fortified interior, and a constant background hum of anxiety that someone is going to see through the performance or that you're going to discover something ugly behind theirs.
Here's where the privacy piece connects. Tim mentions his own privacy was invaded constantly as a kid. So you've got a parent who rummages through your stuff, reads your journal, interrogates your friendships — while simultaneously broadcasting that other people can't be trusted. The lesson lands hard: being known equals being vulnerable to attack. If even your parent uses your interior life as ammunition, why would you hand that material to anyone else?
That's not a personality trait. That's a survival strategy that worked. It kept you safe in an environment where information asymmetry was the only protection you had. The problem is that it doesn't turn off when you leave the environment. You carry the fortress with you into relationships, workplaces, friendships — places where the threat profile is completely different, but your nervous system doesn't know that.
Let's unpack what's actually happening in this dynamic — because it's more specific than just having a critical parent. A parent who says "you could have done better on that test" is one thing. A parent who systematically dismantles the character of every human being who crosses the family's path is doing something else entirely. She's not just criticizing. She's constructing a worldview.
The worldview has a particular architecture. Everyone is either incompetent, malicious, or both. The doctor doesn't know what he's doing. The relative is after the inheritance. The friend is using you for something. The teacher has it out for you. There's no room for neutral — every person is assigned a villain role in a drama where the parent is the only reliable narrator.
Which means the child inherits not just anxiety, but a complete social epistemology. A theory of how to know things about other people. And the theory says: the public presentation is always a mask, and the real truth is always ugly. So social interaction becomes an exercise in threat detection, not connection. You're not listening to what someone is saying — you're scanning for the subtext, the hidden motive, the thing they're not telling you.
There's a neurocognitive angle here that I think is worth naming early, because it helps people understand why this isn't something you just "think your way out of." When you're in a state of hypervigilance — constantly scanning for signs of betrayal, reading between lines, preparing defensive responses — that's a massive cognitive load. Your brain is running a background process that eats up resources that would otherwise be available for genuine connection. You're exhausted after social interactions not because you're an introvert, but because you've been running threat analysis for three hours straight.
The exhaustion reinforces the schema. You come home drained, and part of you concludes: see, people are exhausting, I was right to be guarded. But you're not exhausted by people. You're exhausted by the security apparatus you've built around yourself.
There's actually research on this. Studies on "expressed emotion" in families — a clinical term measuring criticism, hostility, and emotional over-involvement in a household — show that high levels of critical comments from parents predict poorer outcomes in children's mental health, even when the criticism is framed as being for the child's own good. The framing doesn't protect the kid. The impact on the developing brain is the same regardless of whether the parent says "I'm just being honest" or "this is tough love.
That's the "tough love" trap Tim names directly. The parent's cruelty is always justified as being for your benefit. And that creates a cognitive double-bind that is genuinely diabolical. Either you accept that you deserve the criticism — which damages your self-worth — or you reject the parent entirely, which threatens the attachment relationship you depend on for survival. Most kids can't do either one cleanly, so they split the difference. They internalize the criticism while resenting it. They believe the parent loves them and believe the parent's assessment of them is accurate, and those two beliefs sit in permanent tension.
That tension follows you into adulthood. You hear the parent's voice in your head when you make a mistake. "I'm just being honest with you — you're not good at this." "This is tough love, but someone needs to tell you." And because it was framed as love, you don't recognize it as an intrusion. It feels like conscience, or high standards, or realism. But it's none of those things. It's an internalized critic wearing a caring mask.
Which brings us to the social anxiety piece, and I want to be precise about what's different here. Standard social anxiety is typically about fear of negative evaluation — "people will judge me, people will think I'm awkward, people won't like me." What Tim is describing is adjacent but distinct. It's not fear of being judged. It's the expectation of discovering that everyone is exactly as two-faced as the parent claimed. The anxiety isn't "what if they don't like me?" It's "when will they reveal that they've been contemptuous all along?
That's such a crucial distinction. Because the treatment implications are different. If you're afraid of judgment, the cognitive work is about challenging the belief that judgment is catastrophic. But if you're afraid of duplicity, the cognitive work is about challenging the belief that duplicity is the default. You need to gather evidence that people can be kind, not just evidence that you can survive unkindness.
Gathering that evidence is hard when your privacy defenses prevent you from ever putting yourself in a position to collect it. This is the self-reinforcing cycle Tim is living in. You can't get corrective emotional experiences if you never let anyone close enough to prove they're trustworthy. The privacy that felt protective becomes the thing that prevents you from discovering it's no longer necessary.
I want to pull on a thread here that I think is underappreciated. When a parent engages in chronic character assassination of others, they're not just teaching the child that people are bad. They're teaching the child a specific method of social cognition. The parent is modeling: here's how you think about people. You look for their flaws. You assign motives. You build a case against them. And the child learns this method and then applies it to themselves.
Right — the parent is the child's first and most influential instructor in how to do social reasoning. If every post-dinner conversation is a seminar in finding the worst possible interpretation of everyone's behavior, you're going to get very good at that skill. And then you turn it inward. You become fluent in self-indictment.
There's a physiological layer here too. Research indicates that adults raised by highly critical parents show elevated cortisol responses in social evaluation situations. So when Tim walks into a room of people, his body is doing something that someone without this history isn't doing. His stress response is activated not by a threat, but by the mere possibility of evaluation. The body has learned that being seen is dangerous.
That's what I mean about this not being something you think your way out of. The schema is embodied. It's in your cortisol, your startle response, your automatic first interpretation of an ambiguous facial expression. Cognitive work can rewire some of that, but it takes time and repetition, and it helps to understand why it's slow. You're not just changing a belief. You're retraining a nervous system that spent two decades learning that vigilance was the price of safety.
Let me name one more piece of the architecture before we move into the mechanisms. Tim mentions that his parent has cast virtually everyone as some kind of villain. There's nobody who escapes this treatment. And I think that totality is diagnostic. A parent who criticizes one particular neighbor or one particular relative might just have a grudge. A parent who finds something wrong with everyone is doing something else — she's maintaining a worldview that requires her to be the sole arbiter of who is worthy. It's not about the targets. It's about the position it puts her in.
The only reliable narrator. The only person who sees clearly. Everyone else is either fooled or complicit. And if you're the child in that dynamic, you learn that the price of being in the parent's good graces is agreeing with her assessments. Disagree — suggest that maybe the doctor does know what he's doing, maybe the cousin isn't actually scheming — and you risk being reclassified. You go from trusted confidant to one of the dupes, or worse, one of the villains.
Which is why so many adults in Tim's position report this strange split consciousness in social situations. Part of them is present, engaging, trying to connect. And part of them is watching from the outside, running the parent's algorithm — what would she say about this person? What's the hidden flaw here? What am I not seeing? And that second part is exhausting, but it also feels necessary, because it was necessary for so long.
To understand why this pattern is so sticky, we need to look at the cognitive machinery underneath it. Tim's question is fundamentally about how you dismantle a worldview that was installed before you had the ability to evaluate it. And to answer that, we have to get specific about how the schema operates, what maintains it, and where the leverage points are for change.
The thing Tim keeps circling back to is the privacy piece, and I think that's because it's the part that feels most like a personality trait when it's actually a scar. You tell yourself "I'm just a private person" and that sounds like an identity — like being an introvert or liking quiet mornings. But the giveaway is the feeling underneath it. Real preference for privacy feels like peace. Defensive privacy feels like fear of exposure.
That's the diagnostic distinction. If your privacy is driven by a preference for solitude, you feel relief when you're alone. If it's driven by fear of being known, you feel relief when you've successfully hidden. Those are different things. And the second one has a cost that the first one doesn't — you can't selectively lower the drawbridge. If being known equals being vulnerable to attack, then every relationship hits a ceiling at the point where real disclosure would need to begin.
Tim names that ceiling directly. He says it stymies growth. Which is a remarkably clear-eyed thing to recognize about yourself. Most people in this pattern just feel vaguely stuck and can't locate why. He's identified that the thing that kept him safe is also the thing keeping him small.
There's a concept in developmental psychology that maps perfectly here. Children learn what's called "epistemic trust" — the capacity to trust that the information you receive from others is genuine and applicable to you. When a parent systematically teaches you that everyone is performing, that what people say and what they mean are different things, you don't develop epistemic trust. You develop epistemic suspicion. And that suspicion generalizes. It's not just that you don't trust what the neighbor says. It's that you don't trust that anyone's self-presentation matches their interior.
Which means the child inherits a closed epistemological system. The parent creates a world where there's no outside source of information that can challenge the parent's framework, because every outside source is pre-discredited. The doctor is incompetent, so medical advice doesn't count. The teacher has an agenda, so school feedback doesn't count. The relative is manipulative, so family perspectives don't count. The only valid narrator is the parent.
That's what makes it different from ordinary gossip. Gossip is episodic — you talk about someone, you move on, you might have a perfectly normal relationship with them tomorrow. This is systematic. The parent is building and maintaining a comprehensive theory of the social world, and the theory requires constant maintenance. Every new person who enters the family's orbit has to be slotted into the schema. They're either a rare exception — which never lasts — or they're eventually revealed to be incompetent, malicious, or both.
The maintenance is the tell. A parent who occasionally complains about a difficult coworker isn't doing this. A parent who, over eighteen years, has not produced a single sustained positive characterization of anyone outside the immediate family — or even inside it — is running a program. And the program's output is a child who enters adulthood with what amounts to a conspiracy theory about human nature. Everyone is hiding something. Nobody is what they seem. Kindness is a tactic.
Let's get into the machinery. Mechanism one — and this is the foundation everything else sits on — is what I'd call the "everyone is a villain" schema. Tim's parent didn't just criticize people occasionally. She built a comprehensive database of human awfulness and updated it daily. And for Tim, that database was the only source of social information available. He had no counter-evidence.
Because the parent's framework pre-discredits counter-evidence before it arrives. If the doctor is incompetent, then the doctor's correct diagnosis doesn't count as evidence of competence — it counts as luck, or a broken clock being right twice a day. The schema is self-sealing. Every piece of information gets interpreted through the lens, and the lens always confirms itself.
This isn't paranoia in the clinical sense. Paranoia is an unfounded belief that others are out to get you. What Tim developed is pattern recognition on a skewed sample. His brain did exactly what brains are supposed to do — it extracted regularities from experience. The problem is that his experience was systematically distorted by a parent whose own filter treated every human being as a pending indictment.
The "skewed sample" point is worth sitting with for a second, because it reframes the whole thing. If you train an AI on a data set where ninety percent of the examples are labeled "hostile," it's going to predict hostility everywhere. That's not a bug in the algorithm. It's what the algorithm is supposed to do with the data it was given.
The child has no way to access a different data set. You can't go get a second opinion on your parent's social epistemology when you're eight. You can't say "I'd like to verify these claims about Aunt Susan by spending independent time with her." The parent controls both the information and the interpretation. That's what makes it a closed system.
Which brings us to mechanism two — the privacy-as-defense posture. Tim's parent invaded his privacy constantly while simultaneously broadcasting that other people are dangerous. Those two things together create a very specific lesson: being known is how you get hurt. Not being seen, not being judged — being known. Having someone possess information about your interior life.
The invasion piece is critical here. It's not just that the parent taught him people are untrustworthy. It's that the parent demonstrated, personally, what happens when someone gets access to your private self. She used it. She read his journal, interrogated his friendships, and then — this is the key — she used whatever she found as material. For criticism, for control, for the running commentary on his deficiencies.
Privacy stops being about preference and becomes about survival. The equation in the kid's brain is straightforward: information about me equals ammunition. The only safe amount of disclosure is zero. And that works, temporarily. You stay hidden, you stay safe. But then you're twenty-five, thirty, forty, and you've built a life where nobody actually knows you.
Research backs this up. Adults who grew up with critical, invasive parents consistently report heightened needs for privacy and control over personal information. And it's not just a preference — it's often experienced as a visceral need. The thought of someone reading your texts or knowing your opinions or seeing your creative work before it's polished can trigger a fight-or-flight response that looks disproportionate to outsiders but makes perfect sense given the history.
That's the cortisol piece we touched on earlier. The body learned that exposure equals danger, and the body doesn't care that the danger is now twenty years in the past. It responds to the signal, not the context.
Here's the cruel irony Tim identified himself: the privacy that kept him safe also keeps him stuck. You can't get corrective emotional experiences if you never let anyone close enough to provide them. You can't discover that most people won't use your vulnerability against you if you never offer any vulnerability. The defense becomes the thing that prevents you from learning the defense is no longer necessary.
Mechanism three is the one I think is most insidious, because it attacks the kid's ability to even recognize the damage. The "tough love" framing. Every cruel remark is rebranded as caring. "I'm just being honest with you." "Someone needs to tell you the truth." "This hurts me more than it hurts you." And the child is trapped, because rejecting the criticism means rejecting the love, and rejecting the love threatens the attachment.
This is the double-bind in its purest form. If you accept that the criticism is love, you internalize the message that you're fundamentally flawed and that being told so is an act of care. If you reject the criticism, you're rejecting the parent's love — which a child cannot afford to do. So most kids do what Tim probably did: they split the difference. They take the criticism in, let it become part of their self-concept, and simultaneously build up a layer of resentment they may not even be able to name.
Then they carry that split into adulthood. The internal voice that says "you're not good at this" feels like conscience, or high standards, or realism. Because it was installed under the brand of love. You don't recognize it as an intruder. You think it's you.
There's a neurocognitive dimension to all three of these mechanisms that I want to name explicitly, because it explains why this isn't just "think positive and it'll go away." When you've spent two decades in an environment where social interaction requires constant threat monitoring, your brain develops what's essentially a background process that never turns off. You're scanning faces for micro-expressions of contempt. You're reading between lines for hidden criticism. You're preparing defensive responses to attacks that haven't happened yet.
That background process has a metabolic cost. Your brain is burning glucose running threat analysis while you're supposed to be enjoying a dinner party. That's why social situations leave you drained in a way that feels different from ordinary introversion. You're not tired from interacting. You're tired from running a security simulation for three hours.
The research on this is pretty clear. Adults with histories of high parental criticism show elevated cortisol in social evaluation situations — your basic "people might be forming opinions about me" scenario that most people navigate without a stress response. For someone with Tim's history, that scenario activates the same physiological systems that would activate if there were an actual physical threat. And chronic cortisol elevation has downstream effects on sleep, immune function, even memory consolidation.
The exhaustion isn't imaginary, and it's not weakness. It's a predictable output of a nervous system that was trained in a particular environment and hasn't yet been retrained for a different one. The good news — and there is good news here — is that the same neuroplasticity that encoded the schema can be used to revise it. But you have to understand what you're working with first.
We've established how this schema works. Now let's talk about what it actually does to your life — and more importantly, what you can do about it. The first knock-on effect is what I'd call the social anxiety paradox. Tim's anxiety isn't the standard "people might judge me." It's "people are secretly contemptuous and eventually I'll find out." That's a different thing, and it produces a different flavor of social distress.
Standard social anxiety says the fear is of negative evaluation. This says the fear is of confirmation. You're not worried something bad might happen. You're waiting for the inevitable moment when the mask slips and you discover that, yes, this person too was exactly what your parent said everyone is.
That waiting posture changes how you show up. You're not present in conversations — you're auditing them. Every pause is a potential reveal. Every compliment gets run through a decoder: what did they really mean? It's exhausting in a way that standard social anxiety isn't, because you're not just managing your own performance. You're running a counterintelligence operation.
The second effect builds directly on the first, and Tim named it himself. Extreme privacy creates a ceiling on growth. You can't get corrective emotional experiences if you never let anyone close enough to provide them. If your operating assumption is that disclosure equals vulnerability to attack, you never test whether that's still true in your current environment. The fortress keeps you safe and keeps you ignorant.
Here's the cruel twist Tim might not have seen yet. When you never share anything personal, people don't interpret that as "this person has a trauma history and is protecting themselves." They interpret it as coldness. So the very privacy that's supposed to protect you from negative judgment actually generates it. Friends assume you don't trust them, or don't like them, or think you're above them. The defense produces exactly the social cost it was designed to prevent.
That's the case study that lands for me. Someone realizes they've been sabotaging friendships by never sharing anything real, and then discovers their friends interpreted the silence as rejection. The protection was invisible to everyone except the person holding it. Everyone else just saw a wall and assumed it was about them.
Which brings us to the third effect, and this one is particularly sticky. The tough love internalization. When cruelty is consistently framed as caring, the adult child often replicates the pattern without recognizing it. Sometimes that looks like brutal self-criticism — the voice that says "I'm just being honest with myself" while tearing you apart. Other times it looks like being drawn to partners who offer criticism packaged as honesty, because that dynamic feels like love.
Familiarity masquerading as chemistry. Your nervous system recognizes the tough-love cadence and says "ah yes, this is what care sounds like." And you end up in relationships that reproduce the exact dynamic you're trying to escape, because the criticism-love fusion was installed at the firmware level.
What do you actually do about this? Let me offer three cognitive techniques that directly target these patterns. First, evidence-gathering exercises. This comes straight out of CBT for social anxiety, and the response rates are solid — around sixty to seventy percent in structured protocols. The idea is deliberately collecting counter-evidence to the "everyone is secretly hostile" schema. For one week, you track every social interaction and record what actually happened, not what your threat-detection system said probably happened. Most people discover their predictions are wildly inaccurate.
The key is writing it down. The schema lives in your head, where it can't be fact-checked. You need external records. "I thought this person was judging me — here's what they actually said. I assumed this friend was annoyed — here's what they actually did." The gap between prediction and reality is where the rewiring happens.
Second technique — the reputation audit. This one's more specific to Tim's history. When you catch yourself forming a negative assessment of someone, pause and ask: what would my parent say about this person? Then deliberately generate an alternative, charitable interpretation. The point isn't to replace suspicion with naivety. It's to practice generating multiple interpretations so your brain doesn't default to the only one it was ever taught.
The third is graduated self-disclosure. This directly targets the privacy-as-defense mechanism. You start with low-stakes information — "I had a rough morning," "I'm nervous about this meeting" — and share it with someone you have reason to trust. Then you notice that nothing catastrophic happens. No one uses it as ammunition. The world doesn't end. You do this repeatedly, gradually increasing the stakes, and your nervous system slowly learns that disclosure is no longer dangerous.
There's one more piece I want to name that ties the tough-love framing specifically. It's the practice of benign interpretation — deliberately assuming good faith in others' feedback until proven otherwise. This is the direct counter to the parent's malignant interpretation of everyone's motives. When someone offers criticism, your first move is to ask: what if this person wants to help me? You don't have to believe it yet. You just have to hold it as a possibility alongside the darker interpretation your parent installed.
The distinction between healthy privacy and defensive privacy is worth making explicit here, because Tim's question implies he's trying to figure out where the line is. Healthy privacy is selective and context-dependent. You share different things with different people based on trust and relationship history. Defensive privacy is total and context-independent. The same walls go up with everyone, regardless of whether they've earned them. One is discernment. The other is a blanket policy.
The goal isn't to become an open book. It's to develop the ability to make case-by-case judgments about who gets access to what. That's a skill the parent never modeled and actively prevented the child from developing. Learning it as an adult is slow, awkward work, but it's entirely possible.
Let me give you four concrete things you can try this week that directly target these patterns. First, the counter-evidence journal. For one week, write down every social interaction where someone was kind, helpful, or even just neutral. Not the ones where your threat-detection system suspected hidden contempt — what actually happened. The schema lives in your head where it can't be fact-checked. You need external records.
The discipline is writing down the neutral ones too. Not just the obvious kindnesses. The barista who was neither friendly nor unfriendly. The coworker who answered your question without subtext. The friend who didn't respond to your text immediately because they were busy, not because they were secretly annoyed. These data points are invisible to the schema, but they're most of what actually happens in a day.
Second, micro-disclosures. Share one small, low-stakes piece of personal information with someone you have reason to trust each day. "I had a rough morning." "I'm nervous about this meeting." "I tried making sourdough and it was a disaster." Then notice that nothing catastrophic happens. Nobody uses it as ammunition. The world doesn't end. Your nervous system needs repeated exposure to the fact that disclosure is no longer dangerous.
The key word there is "low-stakes." Don't start with your deepest childhood wound. Start with the emotional equivalent of touching a warm stovetop — something that proves the burn isn't coming. And if one day you share something and it feels like too much, you can pull back. The point is experimentation, not forced vulnerability.
Third, when you hear your internal tough-love voice — the one that sounds like conscience but is really your parent in disguise — stop and ask: would I say this to a friend in the same situation? If the answer is no, reframe it as guidance rather than judgment. "You're terrible at this" becomes "you're still learning this." Same observation, completely different posture toward yourself.
Fourth, for the privacy piece specifically. Identify one area of your life where privacy is costing you more than it's protecting you. Maybe it's not sharing your creative work. Maybe it's not asking for help at work. Maybe it's never telling friends when you're struggling. Pick one, and make one small move toward visibility this week. Not a full confession. Just a single step across a line you usually won't cross.
The pattern across all four of these is the same. You're not trying to become a different person. You're running experiments that your schema says will end badly, and then collecting data on what actually happens. The schema was built from a skewed sample. The only way to revise it is to give your brain a bigger, more representative data set.
Where does this leave us? I think there's one question worth sitting with, and Tim's letter points to it without quite asking it directly. How do you tell the difference between legitimate privacy — the kind someone who's been harmed has every right to — and the defensive privacy that's actually preventing growth?
That's the calibration problem, and it's not a one-time solve. Legitimate privacy feels like discernment — you're making a conscious choice about what to share and with whom, and the choice is based on current information about this specific person. Defensive privacy feels like a blanket policy — the walls go up before you've even assessed the situation. One is responsive. The other is preemptive.
The hard part is that someone with Tim's history has earned the right to be cautious. The parent really did use his interior life against him. So the caution isn't irrational. The question is whether it's still proportional. You're not trying to go from fortress to open field overnight. You're trying to install a door that you control, rather than living in a building with no exits.
That's the image I keep coming back to. The parent's worldview was a closed system — no outside information allowed, no alternative interpretations permitted. Recovery isn't about demolishing everything and becoming an open book. It's about learning to open the door, even if just a crack, and discovering that what's on the other side isn't what you were told was there.
That's hard work. Recalibrating a threat detection system that kept you alive for two decades. But it's possible, and Tim already has the thing you need to start — he can see the pattern. He knows the privacy that protected him is also the thing limiting him. That's not a small insight. Most people never get there.
No, they don't. And the fact that he's asking how to tackle this cognitively — not just how to feel better about it, but how to actually rewire the machinery — suggests he's already doing the work. The techniques we talked about are tools for the rewiring. The rest is patience and repetition.
Thanks to Tim Shortnap for sending this one in. It's the kind of question that stays with you.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1780s, Bhutanese monks produced a vivid yellow paint pigment by boiling the leaves of a local rhododendron species with yak butter and a small amount of arsenic-rich river clay. The resulting color was used exclusively for painting the robes of deceased abbots in memorial thangkas, and the recipe was considered sacred enough that writing it down was punishable by expulsion from the monastery.
...right.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want to send us a question like Tim did, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
Until next time.
