Daniel's been through a year that would flatten most people, and he's noticed something strange on the other side of it. His cockroach phobia, the spider thing, the scorpion nerves he picked up after moving to Israel, they've all gone quiet. Not managed, not white-knuckled through. Just absent. He watched a large cockroach cross the road in front of him and felt nothing. His joke to Hannah was that humans turned out to be scarier than cockroaches ever were, but he thinks there's a real mechanism underneath it. His brain recalibrated toward actual threats, keeping a roof over his son's head, and the small irrational fears stopped being worth the effort. He's asking whether that has any basis in the science, and whether anyone else has documented going through the same thing.
The short answer is yes, there's a literature on this, and it's weirder than his joke suggests. But before we get to the war studies, I want to flag something about his specific phobias that makes his story more interesting than he probably realizes.
Which is?
Cockroaches, spiders, scorpions. Those aren't pure fear phobias. They're disgust phobias. And disgust turns out to be much harder to extinguish than fear. A meta-analysis from last year pulled together the conditioning studies and found that conditioned disgust is significantly more resistant to extinction than conditioned fear. The effect sizes, zero point five two versus zero point three seven. So the creepy-crawly category is, in principle, the hardest kind of phobia to shake. Which means Daniel didn't just lose a fear. He lost the stubborn kind.
That's the first thing that should make him sit up. But I want to back up, because he used the word phobia and I think the clinical picture matters here. What he's describing, the cockroach thing, fits a specific phobia. That's a formal diagnosis. Marked, persistent, excessive fear cued by a specific object, causing avoidance and impairment. Lifetime prevalence around seven and a half percent across twenty-two countries. Median age of onset is eight. Eight years old. So most people who have these, they've had them since childhood, and they tend to stick around.
And Daniel's case fits the profile in one important way. He grew up in Ireland, no cockroaches, so the fear wasn't conditioned early. It arrived when he moved to Israel and encountered the thing itself, the giant ones, in his house. That's a later acquisition, which is less typical. The median onset is eight because most specific phobias are wired in during childhood. His came as an adult, through direct exposure to something unpleasant.
The first time he saw a giant cockroach in his house, he was horrified. That's the conditioning event. The fear memory forms, and then every subsequent encounter retrieves it. That's the cycle. Avoidance maintains it because you never get the disconfirming experience.
Right, and the standard treatment is extinction. You form a new safe memory that inhibits the old fear association. That's what exposure therapy does. You show the brain, over and over, that the cockroach is there and nothing catastrophic happens. The old fear memory never gets deleted, it gets outcompeted by the new one. That's the model.
So Daniel's question is whether a year of genuine danger did the extinction for him, without the exposure sessions.
And here's where the literature gets strange. The most on-point study I know of is from the NATO air strikes on Belgrade. Researchers had eighty-four panic disorder patients who were in partial or complete remission. They reassessed them during the bombing. Compared to before the strikes, their overall panic severity went down. Fewer health concerns, decreased disability. The only thing that went up was anticipatory anxiety, which makes sense, you're waiting for the next bomb. But the panic itself, the disordered fear, didn't flare. The authors' conclusion was that panic attacks and fear induced by real danger are different phenomena.
So real danger didn't feed the panic. It actually reduced it. That's counterintuitive.
It gets better. During the first Gulf War, when Iraqi missiles were falling on Israel, researchers interviewed sixty-five panic disorder patients over the first four weeks. Despite high anxiety, no increased frequency of panic attacks. The majority reported good to high functioning. Proximity to the risk made no difference. Their vulnerability to a panic-stricken response did not increase during real-life stress.
That's the opposite of what most people would predict. You'd think the person with panic disorder would be the first to fall apart when the sirens go off.
And yet the data says no. But there's a third study that complicates the picture, and I want to be honest about it. Same context, Iraqi missile attacks on Israel, but this one looked at thirty-one anxiety disorder patients and thirty-one controls, interviewed within hours of the first and second attacks. After the first attack, the patients reported no higher anxiety than the controls. After the second attack, the controls adapted and improved significantly. The patients tended to retain their initial anxiety and pessimism.
So the already-disordered group didn't get the same benefit the second time around.
The real threat reduced fear most clearly in the general population. The clinical group adapted more slowly. Which is a nuance worth holding onto, because Daniel's asking about a specific phobia, not panic disorder, and he's not, as far as we know, in the clinical range of anything. He's a guy with a cockroach phobia who went through a housing crisis and a war. He's closer to the control group in that study.
So the honest read is that his experience maps onto a real effect, but the effect is strongest in people who aren't deeply disordered to begin with. His cockroach thing was real, it caused avoidance, but it wasn't the kind of entrenched, treatment-resistant phobia that defines the clinical population.
And there's another layer. His phobias are disgust-laden. I mentioned the extinction resistance. But there's a study that treated spider-phobic participants with exposure, then tested them on cockroaches as an untreated stimulus. The fear reduction generalized. Approach behavior improved, subjective fear dropped, heart rate calmed, all toward the untreated cockroach. But disgust only declined for the treated stimulus. So fear and disgust can decouple. The fear spills over to related creatures, the disgust stays put.
Which means Daniel's response is even more interesting. He didn't just lose the fear response. The disgust, the thing that's supposed to be the stubborn part, apparently went quiet too.
Or it's still there and he hasn't tested it. He watched a cockroach cross the road. That's a visual encounter at a distance. The real test would be one in his kitchen, at night, when he's barefoot.
Fair. The road cockroach is the easy version.
But I don't want to undersell what he's describing. The mechanism he's reaching for, threat recalibration, has a plausible biological basis. Cortisol. Glucocorticoids. The stress hormones. There's a landmark finding that elevated glucocorticoids impair retrieval of emotionally arousing fear memories. That's the PNAS paper, glucorticoids reduce phobic fear in humans. The idea is that when your stress system is running hot, the brain has trouble pulling up the old fear memory with the same vividness. The phobic response depends on retrieval. If retrieval is impaired, the fear doesn't fire.
So a year of cortisol could have been quietly degrading the cockroach memory.
That's the clean story. And there's supporting evidence that glucocorticoids enhance exposure therapy for spider phobia. A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial found exactly that. Hydrocortisone augmented brief cognitive behavioral therapy for specific fear. The systematic reviews confirm it. Stress hormones plus exposure equals better extinction.
But Daniel didn't do exposure. He just lived through a war and a housing crisis.
Right, and that's where the clean story hits a snag. A twenty twenty-three study induced acute stress before one-session exposure for spider phobia and found no influence on fear reduction. The stress didn't help. It didn't hurt either, but it didn't help. So the simple version, stress automatically kills phobias, is not settled.
So what's the more careful version?
The more careful version is that stress inoculation, the cumulative effect of going through hard things, produces global resilience. There's animal work on this. Mice exposed to prior mild stressors show greater learned extinction of conditioned fear and more active coping across multiple stress contexts. The mice that had been through something were better at learning that a new threat wasn't actually dangerous. That's the closest analogue to what Daniel's describing. Not a single acute stress event, but a year of accumulated stress that rewired his threat detection.
And his threat detection had a lot to chew on. The roof leak. The landlord who wouldn't fix it. Ending the tenancy. Sleeping on a sofa with a six-month-old. Then a month-long war with Iran and suddenly needing alternative accommodation with a relative. That's not a single stressor. That's a whole curriculum.
And notice what all of those threats have in common. They're real. They're immediate. They demand action. A roof leak is not a hypothetical. A landlord who won't fix it is not a vague dread. A war is not a phobic object. The brain had to triage constantly for months. And triage means ranking threats by actual consequence.
Which is exactly his joke. Humans can be scarier than cockroaches. The landlord, the missile, the uncertainty about where his son sleeps. Those are the things that earned the fear response. The cockroach fell off the list.
And the literature supports that framing. The Belgrade researchers said panic attacks and fear induced by real danger are different phenomena. The brain isn't running the same circuit for a cockroach and a missile. When the real danger circuit is active, the phobic circuit seems to get deprioritized.
But I want to push on something. He said the phobia response just didn't kick in. That's a specific claim. It's not that he saw the cockroach, felt the fear, and managed it. It's that the fear didn't fire at all. That's the part that needs explaining.
The retrieval impairment story handles that. If the fear memory can't be retrieved with the same intensity, the response doesn't fire. The glucocorticoid angle suggests that a year of elevated cortisol could have degraded the retrieval pathway. But there's a simpler explanation that doesn't require hormones.
Which is?
Attention. The brain only has so much threat-detection bandwidth. When you're sleeping on a sofa with a six-month-old during a war, your attentional resources are fully occupied by actual survival-relevant stimuli. The cockroach doesn't make the cut. It's not that the fear memory is gone. It's that the brain stopped allocating resources to scanning for it. And once you stop scanning, the encounters that do happen don't trigger the full response, because the response was partly maintained by the anticipation.
So the anticipation was doing a lot of the work.
Always is, with phobias. The fear of the cockroach is mostly the fear of encountering the cockroach. The anticipatory anxiety. The scanning behavior. The checking corners. When you're too exhausted to scan, the anticipation drops, and then the encounter itself is just an encounter.
Which would explain why it vanished so completely. He didn't have the bandwidth to maintain the phobia.
And here's the thing about phobias. They're maintained by avoidance. Every time you avoid the thing, you reinforce the belief that the thing was dangerous enough to avoid. Daniel spent a year unable to avoid actual threats. He couldn't avoid the roof leak. He couldn't avoid the landlord. He couldn't avoid the war. So the avoidance machinery, the thing that keeps phobias alive, got broken through sheer necessity.
He was forced into a year of exposure therapy for everything except cockroaches.
And the cockroach phobia got caught in the crossfire. That's the global resilience story. The stress inoculation work suggests that going through hard things makes you better at learning that new threats aren't threats. The brain generalizes the coping skill.
Now I want to ask the question Daniel actually asked, which is whether other people have gone through this. And the honest answer from the literature is that nobody has studied spontaneous remission of a specific animal phobia following war or housing crisis. The studies we have are about panic disorder during war. The specific cockroach phobia vanishing after a war doesn't appear in PubMed.
Which is a gap, not a refutation. The panic disorder literature establishes the principle. Real danger doesn't worsen disordered fear, and in some cases reduces it. The specific phobia version is just understudied.
And the anecdotal version is everywhere, if you ask people. I'd bet most listeners know someone who went through something enormous and came out the other side with their small fears rearranged.
The clinical term would be stress-induced reprioritization, but that's not a formal diagnosis. It's a description. The formal literature doesn't have a name for what Daniel's describing.
Which is a shame, because it's a real phenomenon. The brain re-ranks threats based on experience. That's not mystical. That's learning.
And the ranking is not always rational. That's the part I want to flag. Daniel's brain decided the cockroach isn't worth fearing because humans are scarier. That's a true ranking in his experience. But it doesn't mean the cockroach is harmless. It means the brain's threat-ranking system is comparative, not absolute. The cockroach didn't get safer. The other threats got bigger.
So the phobia didn't vanish because he learned cockroaches are fine. It vanished because he learned other things are worse.
And that's a different kind of extinction than what exposure therapy does. Exposure therapy teaches you the specific thing is safe. This taught him the specific thing is irrelevant compared to actual danger.
Which might be more durable.
Or less. We don't know. If his life calms down for long enough, the cockroach phobia might come back. The brain might re-rank again. The threat-detection system is dynamic.
That's the question I'd want to follow him on. Six months from now, when the roof is fixed and the war is over and life is boring again, does the cockroach phobia return?
The literature doesn't answer that. The stress inoculation work in mice suggests the resilience persists for a while. But mice aren't humans, and a year of stress isn't a lifetime of conditioning.
His phobia was acquired in adulthood, which might make it less entrenched. The childhood-onset phobias, the ones wired in at eight years old, those are the ones that tend to be lifelong. His was a later acquisition, through a specific experience. That might make it easier to lose.
And he's not a clinical case. He never sought treatment for the cockroach thing. It was a background niggle, as he put it. The clinical population, the people with severe role impairment, those are the ones where the war studies showed slower adaptation.
So the honest summary is that his experience is consistent with a real effect, documented in adjacent populations, with a plausible biological mechanism, but not directly studied in his exact situation.
And the mechanism is probably overdetermined. Cortisol impairing fear memory retrieval, attention being reallocated, avoidance being broken by necessity, stress inoculation producing global resilience. All of those could be true simultaneously. The brain doesn't do single causes.
The joke about humans being scarier than cockroaches is actually the best summary of the science. The brain's threat system is comparative. It ranks. And when the ranking changes, the old fears lose their grip.
I want to add one more piece. The disgust thing. His phobias are disgust-laden, and disgust is supposed to be the stubborn part. So either his disgust system also recalibrated, which is interesting, or the disgust is still there and he just hasn't been close enough to test it. The road cockroach is a visual encounter. The kitchen cockroach is a different thing.
The real experiment would be to put a cockroach in his kitchen and see what happens.
I'm not recommending that. But it's the test.
No, of course not. But the point stands. His evidence is a road encounter. The phobia might be quiet, not gone.
And quiet is still a massive improvement. He's not scanning. He's not avoiding. He's not anticipating. The phobia was mostly the anticipation, and that part is gone.
The anticipation being gone is the thing. That's the part that eats your life. The actual encounter is seconds. The anticipation is years.
And his anticipation got eaten by actual problems. You can't be afraid of a hypothetical cockroach when there's a real ceiling leak.
The ceiling leak as exposure therapy. That's the story.
The ceiling leak, the landlord, the sofa, the war. The whole year was one long exposure session for the fear of real things.
And the cockroach phobia got starved of attention. It's like a plant you stop watering.
That's the attention story. The phobia requires maintenance. Scanning, avoiding, anticipating. When you stop maintaining it, it withers.
So the practical takeaway, if there is one, is that phobias are maintained by the energy you feed them. And sometimes life just takes the energy away.
Which is not a treatment protocol. You can't prescribe a war for a cockroach phobia. But it does suggest that the maintenance conditions matter as much as the original conditioning.
The original conditioning was the first giant cockroach in his house. The maintenance was years of scanning and avoiding. The war broke the maintenance.
And the glucocorticoid story suggests the stress itself was doing something biological. The cortisol was impairing the retrieval of the fear memory. So it's not just attention. It's chemistry.
The chemistry and the attention are probably the same thing, viewed from different levels.
That's the honest read. The brain is doing both simultaneously. The stress hormones are changing what gets retrieved, and the attentional system is changing what gets scanned.
So where does that leave Daniel? He asked whether his experience has a basis in science, and whether others have gone through it. The answer is yes to both, with caveats.
The caveats being that the direct evidence is from panic disorder during war, not specific phobia, and the mechanism is plausible but not settled. And the disgust component makes his case more surprising, not less.
And the anecdotal evidence, the thing that doesn't show up in PubMed, is that people do report this. Small fears rearranged by big events. It's a common human experience.
The literature just hasn't caught up to it. Which is normal. The clinical literature studies what can be measured in controlled conditions. Spontaneous remission following a war is hard to study prospectively.
You'd have to find people with cockroach phobias before a war, then follow them through the war, then measure their phobia after. Nobody's done that.
And the funding for that study would be hard to justify. It's not exactly a public health priority.
But it would answer Daniel's question directly. And his question is a good one.
It is. And I think his intuition is probably right. The brain recalibrated. The threat-ranking system updated. The cockroach fell off the list because the list got crowded with real things.
The joke is the science. Humans are scarier than cockroaches, and the brain noticed.
And the brain noticed in a way that's consistent with what we know about fear extinction, stress hormones, and attention. It's not a mystery. It's just understudied.
The one thing I'd want Daniel to know is that the phobia might not be gone. It might be quiet. And quiet is good. But the brain re-ranks constantly, and if life stays calm for long enough, the cockroach might climb back up the list.
Which is not a reason to worry. It's a reason to notice. He's in a window where the phobia is quiet. If he wanted to do exposure work now, while the fear is down, it would probably be more effective than at any other time.
That's a useful insight. The window of quiet is the best time to do the extinction work. The fear is already down. The new safe memory would form faster.
Because the old fear memory is already impaired. The cortisol did half the work. The exposure would just finish the job.
So the practical takeaway is not just that his experience is real. It's that he's in a unique position to make the change permanent.
If he wants to. He might not want to. The phobia being quiet might be enough.
For a cockroach phobia, quiet is probably enough. It's not like he needs to handle cockroaches for work.
No, but the principle generalizes. If the war quieted the cockroach phobia, it probably quieted other things too. The question is what else got re-ranked.
That's the thing I keep thinking about. He said many of these background irrational niggles have more or less vanished. That's plural. Not just the cockroach. The spiders, the scorpions, the whole category.
The whole category of small animal fears. The disgust-laden creepy-crawly cluster. All of it went quiet at once.
Which suggests the recalibration was at the level of the threat system, not the individual phobia. The brain didn't extinguish the cockroach fear. It re-ranked the entire category of small threats.
And that's the global resilience story. The stress inoculation work shows that prior stress produces resilience across multiple stress contexts. Not just the specific stressor. The whole system gets more efficient.
So Daniel's experience is a human version of stress inoculation. A year of real threats taught his brain to stop wasting energy on small ones.
And the teaching was probably unconscious. He didn't decide to stop fearing cockroaches. The brain just did it.
Which is the weirdest part. He noticed the absence. That's not how extinction usually works. Usually you notice the fear, then you notice it fading. He just noticed it was gone.
The absence of a response is hard to notice. You have to encounter the thing and realize you didn't react. That's what happened with the road cockroach.
The road cockroach as the moment of discovery. He saw it, expected the fear, and the fear didn't come.
Then he made a joke about it. Which is itself a sign. You don't joke about something that's actively terrifying you.
The joke was the evidence. The fact that he could joke about it means the fear was already gone.
That's a clinical observation, actually. Humor about the phobic object is a sign of distance from the fear.
His joke to Hannah was the moment of diagnosis. The phobia was dead, and he noticed by making a joke.
The joke was also the explanation. Humans are scarier than cockroaches. That's the mechanism in one sentence.
The science supports the joke. That's the episode.
The science supports the joke with caveats.
The science always supports the joke with caveats.
Fair.
Where do we land? His experience is real, it's consistent with adjacent research, the mechanism is probably cortisol plus attention plus broken avoidance, and the phobia might be quiet rather than gone.
The window of quiet is an opportunity, if he wants to make it permanent.
The bigger point is that the brain re-ranks threats based on experience, and a year of real danger re-ranked his entire threat system.
The small fears didn't vanish. They got outcompeted.
By actual problems. Which is somehow comforting.
It is. The brain isn't broken. It's adaptive. It just needed something real to calibrate against.
The cockroach was always a proxy for something. The war gave the brain the actual thing.
The actual thing was scarier, so the proxy lost its power.
Daniel's joke is the whole story. Humans are scarier than cockroaches, and the brain finally noticed.
The brain noticed a year ago. Daniel just caught up.
The answer to his question is yes, with caveats, and the caveats are interesting.
The caveats are the interesting part. The direct evidence is from panic disorder during war. The mechanism is plausible but not settled. The disgust component makes his case surprising. And the phobia might come back.
But the core intuition is sound. The brain recalibrated. The threat-ranking system updated. The small fears lost their grip.
The practical takeaway is that he's in a window of quiet, and if he wants to make the change permanent, now is the time.
Which is not advice. It's an observation.
It's an observation about the timing of extinction. The fear is down. The new safe memory would form faster.
The window of quiet as the best time to do the work.
If he wants to do the work.
If he wants to.
Hilbert: I had a cockroach phobia.
Wait.
Hilbert: Not the clinical kind. The kind where you see one and your skin crawls and you can't sleep until you've killed it. Had it for years. Then I spent a summer doing pest control in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in nineteen eighty-seven. By August I was eating a sandwich with one hand and crushing them with the other. The phobia didn't come back.
That's exposure, though. That's the standard treatment.
Hilbert: It wasn't treatment. It was a job. The job paid four twenty-five an hour and the guy who ran it, a man named Sal, told me on day one that if I flinched every time I saw a roach I'd never finish a shift. So I stopped flinching. Took about three weeks.
The necessity did it. You couldn't avoid them and keep the job.
Hilbert: The necessity and the volume. When you've seen five hundred of them in a day, the five hundred and first is just a bug. The fear runs out of fuel.
That's the attention story. The brain stops allocating resources when the stimulus is constant.
Hilbert: I don't know about resources. I know that by the end of the summer I could reach into a cabinet and pull out a dead one without thinking about it. The phobia was just gone. And it stayed gone. That was thirty-nine years ago.
You're the anecdotal evidence Daniel was asking about.
Hilbert: I'm one of them. There's more. My brother-in-law spent two years working in a warehouse that had a rat problem. Before that he'd cross the street to avoid a rat. After two years of trapping them, he kept one as a pet. Named it Gerald.
That's exposure plus desensitization plus the necessity of the job.
Hilbert: It's what Daniel said. The brain recalibrates. It just needed something real to calibrate against.
In your case the real thing was a paycheck.
Hilbert: The real thing was Sal telling me to get back to work. The paycheck was secondary.
The social pressure of the job. That's a real threat too.
Hilbert: It was real enough. More real than the roaches.
The necessity doesn't have to be a war. It can be a boss.
Hilbert: It can be anything that forces you to stop avoiding. The avoidance is the thing that keeps the fear alive. Once you can't avoid, the fear has to either adapt or burn out. Mine burned out.
That's the clinical model, actually. The avoidance maintains the phobia. Break the avoidance, and the fear has a chance to extinguish.
Hilbert: I don't know about the clinical model. I know what happened. The first week was hell. The second week was less hell. By the third week I was fine. By August I was the guy they sent into the crawlspaces because I didn't care anymore.
The crawlspaces.
Hilbert: The crawlspaces were the worst part. Dark, damp, full of roaches. The first time I went in, I came out shaking. The last time, I took a nap in one.
You took a nap in a crawlspace full of cockroaches.
Hilbert: It was a slow afternoon.
That's the most complete extinction I've ever heard of.
Hilbert: The phobia didn't come back. I've had roaches in my apartment since then. I kill them and go back to sleep. No skin crawl, no checking corners. The fear just isn't there.
You never did formal exposure therapy.
Hilbert: I did the summer of nineteen eighty-seven. That was the therapy.
The summer of nineteen eighty-seven as a treatment protocol.
Hilbert: It worked better than anything I've seen since. And I've seen a lot of treatments.
I believe you. The literature says the same thing. Exposure works. The mechanism doesn't care whether the exposure is voluntary or forced.
Hilbert: Forced is faster. Voluntary exposure, you can quit when it gets hard. Forced, you can't quit. So the brain has to adapt.
That's the difference between Daniel's experience and a therapy session. He couldn't quit the war.
Hilbert: I couldn't quit the job. Same mechanism.
The necessity of the situation breaks the avoidance cycle. That's the common thread.
Hilbert: The common thread is that the brain is lazy. It doesn't want to waste energy on threats that aren't paying off. When the roaches stopped being the biggest problem, the fear of them stopped being worth the energy.
The fear was never about the roaches. It was about the energy the brain was willing to spend on them.
Hilbert: The fear was about the avoidance. Once the avoidance was impossible, the fear had nothing to do.
That's a very clean way to put it.
Hilbert: It's what happened. The fear had nothing to do, so it left.
It didn't come back.
Hilbert: It didn't come back. I've got four roach traps in my kitchen right now. I put them out in March. I check them once a month. When there's a roach in one, I throw it out and put a new one. No dread, no anticipation. Just a chore.
The phobia became a chore.
Hilbert: The phobia became a chore. That's the whole story.
That's the whole story of Daniel's question too. The phobia became a chore, and then it became nothing.
Hilbert: The war did what the job did. It gave the brain something real to worry about, and the small stuff fell off the list.
The small stuff stays off, at least in your case.
Hilbert: Thirty-nine years and counting.
The answer to Daniel's question is yes, other people have gone through this, and the mechanism is the same whether the real thing is a war or a summer job.
Hilbert: The real thing just has to be real enough to break the avoidance.
That's the one thing I'd want to land. The phobia wasn't defeated by insight or willpower. It was defeated by necessity. The brain stopped maintaining it because the energy was needed elsewhere.
The window of quiet that follows is the best time to make the change permanent, if you want to.
Hilbert: Or you just let it stay quiet. Quiet is fine.
Quiet is fine.
Quiet is fine. And the joke is the science. Humans are scarier than cockroaches, and the brain finally noticed.
The brain noticed a year ago. Daniel just caught up.
That's the episode.
That's the episode. And I think the forward-looking question is whether the quiet lasts. Daniel's six months out from the worst of it. If the phobia stays quiet through a year of normalcy, that's real extinction. If it comes back, that's the brain re-ranking again.
The brain re-ranks constantly. That's the thing to remember. The threat system is dynamic. What's quiet today might not be quiet tomorrow.
But the window is real, and the mechanism is real, and the experience is more common than the literature admits.
The literature just hasn't caught up to the crawlspaces.
The literature never caught up to the crawlspaces.
We should thank Hilbert for the crawlspaces.
We should thank Hilbert for producing the show, and for the crawlspaces.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you've got a fear that went quiet after something real, we'd love to hear about it. Email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
